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Tag Archives: hacking

911 Hacking Causes False SWAT Dispatch

From the OC Register -

“SWAT officers expected to find a victim shot to death, drugs and a belligerent armed suspect when they surrounded the home of an unsuspecting couple, but found they were only a part of a false emergency call caused by a teenager who hacked into the county’s emergency response system, authorities said.”

Fortunately nobody was killed, but the couple was handcuffed before SWAT members realized this was a prank call.  The ‘father’ I assume is lucky to be alive.  He heard noises outside the house and grabbed a knife from the kitchen before SWAT came in.

Randall Ellis is expected in court Monday to face charges of “computer access and fraud, false imprisonment by violence, falsely reporting a crime and assault with an assault weapon by proxy.”  Hopefully they throw the book at this kid and put him away for a long time.

The Pirate Bay Hacked

From The Pirate Bay Blog –  

“They have got a copy of the user database. That is, your username and passwords. But, the passwords are stored encrypted, so it’s not a big deal, but it’s still very sad that it’s out there. All e-mails are for instance encrypted as well, they will most likely not be able to decrypt them either (they are _very_ encrypted).”

So, if you have ever used TPB, and you were stupid enough to actually create an account on there, I’d reccomend changing your passwords ASAP.  And then take another look at how smart it is to be using public trackers like TPB.

First Prosecution for Wardriving in the US takes place in Michigan

It is official, the first Wardriving conviction is going to fall on the shoulders of 23 year old Paul Timmins. Paul and his then roomate found an open Wi-Fi connection at a Lowes in Southfield, Mi. His Friend then came back with a young hacker and proceeded to route through Lowes corporate. Installing a mod on some software so they could collect credit card information. Those two got the worst of the sentences. The Roomate got 41 to 51 Months in jail and cant touch a computer for 10-15 years. The Hacker got a rather harsh sentence of 12 to 15 years in jail. Timmins will only be in jail for about 12 months. So the question remains, how many of you will continue to wardrive knowing that you could spend some time behind bars?

User-Level Crash Exploit

(from Slashdot)

An exploit has been discovered which can completely freeze up a linux box. The code does not require root level access to run, just a shell and access to a compiler. The problem appears to be that if you trigger a floating point exception inside a signal handler (specifically SIGALRM), the kernel doesnt handle it correctly, hanging the system. Several kernels are immune to this, mostly from Gentoo, ie 2.4.26-rc3-gentoo: ” I have no idea why this kernel version is safe from this exploit. It just is.” Get the code and patches. This will require a recompile of your kernel to fix.