Google Uzbekistan DNS Hijacked By 1337, Pakistani Hacker

A Pakistani hacker, whose alias is 1337 claimed responsibility for what appeared to be a DNS Hijacked www.google.co.uz , the Uzbekistani version of Google’s search engine.

Google.co.uz Domain Details:

http://www.nic.uz/whois/?domain=google&zone=co.uz

US Govt is Watching Your Emails, Images, Videos, Search History, Skype Calls, Files, Chats

There are chances that you might have thought of being watched by US government through Gmail, Facebook and other internet giants who are holding your sensitive and most private data.

The news is that all your fears were real, as a new secret document has proven the existence of a US government program that grants NSA (National Security Agency) and FBI the direct access to the servers of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Skype, Yahoo, Apple and other internet companies, from where they can extract any user information at their will.

Named as PRISM, the program was sanctioned by President Bush in 2007, which is now renewed again by President Obama in December 2012.

Under this program, tech giants gave the direct access to its servers to US government agencies, through which they can grab any information they want, without any hurdle.

The information that NSA can access may include your emails, chats, search history, images, videos, skype calls (even the content of skype calls), YouTube videos (even those which are private), files that are stored in your computer, call records of your smartphones, SMS, MMS, places you visit and much more.

Microsoft joined this program before anyone, followed by Yahoo and Google. Facebook, Skype, Youtube, AOL and Apple are also the program partners who have given the direct access and they can obtain information of any kind for any user who uses these services.

Dropbox is likely to be added in the list of partner companies soon.

PRISM enables US government agencies to reach directly into the servers of the participating companies and obtain both stored communications as well as perform real-time collection on targeted users.

Interestingly, US agencies call PRISM “one of the most valuable, unique and productive accesses for NSA”.

Another fact, which may worry our local “Privacy and Internet Freedom Activists” to a greater level is that Pakistan is second largest spying target of NSA, after Iran. Over 13.5 billion reports were gathered from Pakistan in March 2013 only.

Given the amount of data we share with these companies, including our personal and private information, this revelation is alarming and raise countless serious questions, concerning the morality of tech companies and US government.

New Mastercard has LCD screen and keyboard

A credit card with an LCD display and built-in keyboard has been launched in Singapore by Mastercard.

The card has touch-sensitive buttons and the ability to create a "one-time password" - doing away with the need for a separate device sometimes needed to log in to online banking.

Future versions of the card could display added information such as the remaining balance.

The card will be available from January before being rolled out globally.

Many of the world's banks require customers to log in to online banking by using a small security device to generate a one-off password.

Bulky token

While considerably more secure than typical static username and password log-in systems, many people find using security tokens cumbersome given the need to keep it with them in order to use online banking.

Mastercard's interactive card aims to solve that issue.

"We brainstormed on ways to make it convenient and yet secure for customers," said V Subba from Standard Chartered Bank, which is collaborating with Mastercard.

"The question was: instead of sending customers another bulky token, could we replace something which already exists in the customer's wallet? That was when credit, debit and ATM cards immediately came to mind."

Eventually, the card could display information such as loyalty or reward points or recent transaction history.

Improving the portability of secure banking is a continuing priority for the world's credit card firms.

Last year, Visa announced a similar card with interactive functions.

However, smartphone manufacturers will be hoping that enhanced credit cards will be quickly replaced by NFC - near-field communication - alleviating the need for physical payment cards altogether.

Source:BBC

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Microsoft Changed there Logo after 25 Years

In advance of one of the most significant waves of product launches in Microsoft’s history, today we are unveiling a new logo for the company.

It’s been 25 years since we’ve updated the Microsoft logo and now is the perfect time for a change. This is an incredibly exciting year for Microsoft as we prepare to release new versions of nearly all of our products. From Windows 8 to Windows Phone 8 to Xbox services to the next version of Office, you will see a common look and feel across these products providing a familiar and seamless experience on PCs, phones, tablets and TVs. This wave of new releases is not only a reimagining of our most popular products, but also represents a new era for Microsoft, so our logo should evolve to visually accentuate this new beginning.

The Microsoft brand is about much more than logos or product names. We are lucky to play a role in the lives of more than a billion people every day. The ways people experience our products are our most important “brand impressions”. That’s why the new Microsoft logo takes its inspiration from our product design principles while drawing upon the heritage of our brand values, fonts and colors.

The logo has two components: the logotype and the symbol. For the logotype, we are using the Segoe font which is the same font we use in our products as well as our marketing communications. The symbol is important in a world of digital motion (as demonstrated in the video above.) The symbol’s squares of color are intended to express the company’s diverse portfolio of products.

Starting today, you’ll see the new Microsoft logo being used prominently. It will be used on Microsoft.com – the 10th most visited website in the world. It is in three of our Microsoft retail stores today (Boston, Seattle’s University Village and Bellevue, Wash.) and will shine brightly in all our stores over the next few months. It will sign off all of our television ads globally. And it will support our products across various forms of marketing. Fully implementing a change like this takes time, so there may be other instances where you will see the old logo being used for some time.
We’re excited about the new logo, but more importantly about this new era in which we’re reimagining how our products can help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential.

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8.7 million mobile customers hacked in South Korea

SEOUL — South Korean police have arrested two hackers who stole personal data of 8.7 million customers of the nation’s second-biggest mobile operator, the company said.

KT said the hackers — formally arrested on Sunday — had stolen data such as customers’ names, phone numbers and residential registration numbers for five months since February and sold the information to telemarketing firms.

“The number of affected people account for nearly a half of about 17 million customers of ours,” a KT spokesman told AFP, adding the company had alerted police on July 13 after detecting traces of hacking attacks.

Yonhap news agency, citing police, said the duo — including a former veteran programmer at a local IT company — had earned at least 1 billion won (about $880,000) by selling the stolen data.

Seven other people were also booked for buying the leaked data for telemarketing purposes, Yonhap said.

“We deeply bow our head in apology for having your precious personal information leaked… we’ll try our best to make such things never happen again,” KT said in a statement to customers.

Hacking attacks on major companies aimed to gain access to the personal data of their customers is a frequent occurence in South Korea, one of the world’s most-wired nations.

Seoul authorities said in July last year hackers using an Internet address registered in China had gained access to South Korean major websites including web portal Nate.com and may have stolen the private data of 35 million users.

In November 2011, Seoul’s top games developer Nexon saw personal information of 13 million users of its popular online game MapleStory stolen by hackers.

In March 2010, authorities launched a probe into the security systems of major retailer Shinsegae and 24 other companies after private data on 20 million customers was leaked.

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2 Million OS X Mountain Lion Copies Sold in 48 Hours

Apple’s latest Mac platform release, the OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, has seen great response from users right from the start.

The Cupertino-based company managed to sell two million copies of the new OS X in only 48 hours after the official launch, in line with the success last year’s Lion platform registered.

The new platform release comes with an appealing price tag, namely $19.99, which has certainly contributed to its success.

Moreover, the platform was offered for free to all those who purchased a new Mac machine after June 11th, 2012.

However, it should be noted that Apple hasn’t yet provided official numbers on Mountain Lion sales, but that the info comes from Chitika, which estimates 2.11 million copies of the OS being sold in the first two days of availability.

The new operating system comes with a wide range of enhancements when compared to the OS X Lion release, Apple counting no less than 200 of them.

Download Link From Sofpedia : http://mac.softpedia.com/get/System-Utilities/OS-X-Mountain-Lion.shtml

Chitika Insights also notes that there are over 45 percent of Mac users still running OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, but that all those using 10.6.6 or higher could upgrade their systems to 10.8.

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Anonymous Rattles A Chinese Web Giant

Anonymous may be best known for knocking websites offline or stealing data, but one faction of the movement is subverting figures of power in a more circumspect way — by trawling through documents and computer code.

The sub group Anonymous Analytics released a damning report yesterday about Qihoo, the Chinese web giant that claims to be the No. 1 provider of Internet and mobile security products and services in China, as measured by its user base.

Qihoo distributes antivirus software called 360 Safeguard and has a browser called 360 Secure Browser, but in recent years has restructured it business to focus on selling online advertising space, in particular from a single directory page, hao.360.cn. The company claims to get approximately 90% of its advertising revenue “directly or indirectly” from this page and its sub pages; advertising accounted for 73% of the company’s total revenue in 2011 of $22.9 million.

That figure marked an increase of 136% from the year before, meaning hao.360.cn is a serious money-maker for Qihoo. Qihoo recently said that it charged, on average, 1 million yuan  ($156,000) per month, per link on the “Famous Sites” section of its directory page — a breed of e-commerce widely known to have dwindled in Western cyberspace.

Anonymous Analytics says there’s something fishy about Qihoo’s directory page. Qihoo recently claimed on its fourth quarter conference call that the page was getting 20% more web traffic than dominant-player Baidu’s similar page and its sub pages, hao123.com. Qihoo confirmed this with me, citing a table of figures from iResearch.

But the Anonymous group claims that Qihoo is “grotesquely exaggerating” its traffic advantage, and their evidence comes in the form of a recent change in the source code of hao.360.cn. Having been monitoring the site since last year, the group noticed that a comScore tag had been added to Qihoo’s HTML source code. (ComScore is the best-known, third-party verifier of a web site’s traffic.)

This seemed fine, until the tag was removed on or around June 20, 2012. Why? Anonymous Analytics thinks that Qihoo didn’t like the figures it was seeing. The group then managed to get what it claims are the actual comScore figures through unnamed third parties — “people we trust,” according to the group’s representative — who had bought them from comScore. The figures show that in the months of February, March and April 2012, Qihoo’s all-important directory page had 56%, 51% and 52% less traffic than Baidu’s.

Anonymous Analytics provided me with what appears to be a legitimate document from comScore showing web traffic figures for Baidu and Qihoo’s main directory pages in April 2012. It states that Baidu’s directory page had 84.689 million unique visitors from China, while Qihoo’s had 40.877 million.

The activist group believes that before Qihoo balked at the figures, it had added the comScore tag to appease analysts, investors and critics, “who have called for management to provide independent verification of Qihoo’s traffic claims.”

The group further believes that management installed the tag with a view figuring out how to manipulate comScore’s traffic analytics. “We are so certain of this that we invite engineers at comScore to analyze data coming out of hao.360.cn since the beginning of the year,” Anonymous Analytics says.

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NSA Turns To Hackers To Make Internet Secure From Cyber Attackers

The National Security Agency has sought the help of professional hackers to render the World Wide Web more secure.

Reports from the PCWorld and Reuters indicate that General Keith B Alexander, Director, National Security Agency sought the help of hackers while addressing the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas July 27.

Speaking at the conference, General Alexander said: “This is the world’s best cybersecurity community. In this room right here is the talent our nation needs to secure cyberspace,” PCWorld reported.

Urging a collaborative approach to secure the cyberspace, Gen. Alexander, who also head of the U.S. Cyber Command and Central Security Service, urged hackers to partner with government and industry to realize the objective.

Stating that hackers can educate others who do not understand cybersecurity, the NSA Chief said: “You know that we can protect networks and have civil liberties and privacy and you can help us get there.”

The rare courtship of NSA Chief and hackers seems to have come on the heels of increased cyberattacks against U.S. cyber infrastructure. ThePCWorld report cited a 17-fold increase in cyberattacks reported against the Federal Government between 2009 and 2011.

Gen. Alexander urged the hacker community to continue building better tools that were needed to protect the cyberspace citing examples of Metasploit and other penetration testing tools, PCWorld added.

Seeking hackers support in defending the nation against cyberattacks, Gen. Alexander rued: “The issue is that if you don’t see a cyberattack you can’t defend against it and at the moment, the NSA has no insight if Wall Street is going to be attacked, for (an) example.”

Urging cooperation from the industry, Alexander called on the corporate to share at least limited pieces of information from their intrusion detection systems in real-time so that NSA could follow up such instances of aberration.

Gen. Alexander stressed on joint evolution of standards post-information sharing as the key to secure critical infrastructure and sensitive networks.

Gen. Alexander’s presence at the Defcon was hailed as a rare occurrence as Jeff Moss, Founder, Defcon, revealed

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Samsung Galaxy Tab Stays Banned in the US in Increasingly Bizarre Apple Case

Samsung tried to get it overturned, but the preliminary injunction against its Galaxy Tab tablet in the US will be enforced after all, despite different rulings in other parts of the world.

District Judge Lucy Koh issued an injunction, back in late June, against the Samsung Galaxy Tab tablet, which essentially forbids its sale in the United States.

Naturally, the company wasn't about to take it lying down, so it turned to the US appeals court, hoping it wouldn't have to change the looks.

Unfortunately, its attempts to overturn the ruling was denied. Also, the court refused to speed up the appeal process, which means that Samsung has to wait until July 30 at the very earliest before it can be heard again.

"Samsung may of course significantly self-expedite the case by filing its own brief early. Samsung, however, has not shown that the time for Apple to file its brief should be shortened," the court said in its ruling, according to The Register.

Apple is no doubt ecstatic about the outcome, bizarre as it is. We call it bizarre because of the grounds on which the ban was granted in the first place.

The patent which Apple managed to use in the banning of the Samsung Galaxy Tab is "the ornamental design for an electronic device," which describes what a tablet looks like.

We won't say (again) how strange it is that someone is allowed to claim ownership of what is essentially an aesthetic concept that was used, by others, before Apple's iPad even came out. That's for the USPTO to sort out.

Instead, we'll draw attention to the fact that the very same patent was ruled to not have been infringed by Samsung's Galaxy Tab in a different part of the world: The United Kingdom.

Remarks of Tab not being as “cool” as iPad aside, there is another matter: the same court has ordered Apple to publicly admit, advertise even, that the Galaxy Tab is not a copy, and keep doing so for at least six months. It's the closest thing to a public apology we can think of.

Apple might still get out of it but, if it does not, this patent war will reach new levels of ridiculous. Apple will basically declare, in official capacity, that Galaxy Tab does not infringe its IP, while declaring, in official capacity, that Galaxy Tab does infringe its IP, only in a different part of the world.

We'll give this mess this much: it gave the term “cognitive dissonance” a whole new meaning.

Reference:  http://news.softpedia.com/news/Samsung-Galaxy-Tab-Stays-Banned-in-the-US-Apple-Can-Rejoice-282495.shtml

London2012rentals.com Hacked, 5000 Accounts Leaked by 5NiP3R

5NiP3R been busy again,. alerting us to another fairly big dump fo accounts from another United kingdom website that is based on the 2012 Olympics.

London 2012 Rentals provides the most powerful search for all your Olympic rentals and Olympic lettings during the Summer 2012 games in London! Listings of Olympic accommodations include rental houses, flats, rooms or luxury apartments in London and its surrounding areas during the 2012 Olympics. Rent your house during the games now!

The leak has been posted to anonpaste on peopleliberationfront and is in the format of encrypted passwords, emails.

Leaked Data : Pastebin

South Africa's Leading ISP Directory Hacked by NullCrew, 450 Account Details Leaked

NullCrew, The Hacker group that has taken credit for hacking WHO, ASUS and PBS ,returns with another major data breach. Hackers claimed to have access to the database belong to the South Africa's Leading ISP Directory and Community Portal(ispdirectory.co.z).

Hackers leaked the database in pasteBay. "We have hacked an ISP Directory from Africa, and we have dumped all the results." Hacker said in the leak.

http://pastebay.net/1068140

The leak contains Usernames, passwords and Emails. Passwords are in plain text format.

New Kernel Update Available for All Ubuntu OS

Canonical announced earlier today, June 29th, in a security notice, that new Linux kernel updates for its Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin), Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot), Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal), Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) and Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) operating systems is now available, fixing three important security vulnerabilities discovered in the Linux kernel packages by various developers. 

The following vulnerability affects the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and Ubuntu 11.10 kernels: CVE-2012-2375.

The following three vulnerabilities affect the Ubuntu 11.04 kernel: CVE-2012-2313, CVE-2012-2319 and CVE-2012-2375.

The following two vulnerabilities affect the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and 8.04 LTS kernels: CVE-2012-2313 and CVE-2012-2319.

For details about the vulnerabilities found in the Linux kernel packages you can click on each one, as it affects other Linux operating systems as well.

The security flaws can be fixed if you upgrade your system(s) now. To apply the update, run the Update Manager application or follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.

Don't forget to reboot your computer after the upgrade!


Reference : Link

Hacker Mr.Badoo Arrested by FBI

Mr.Badoo is one of most famous and old hacker of Pakistan in cyber space.He is arrested by FBI on June, 25, 2012 for hacking into PC of Andy who create any event of drawing Prophet Muhammad’s(SAW). He hacked Andy account and remove that event from facebook.

 It has been almost 2 Years from now. It all started with a maniac’s malicious efforts of maligning Islam when he, the name’s Andy, started a facebook event of drawing Prophet Muhammad’s(SAW) picture with only one intention of maligning the image of Islam and hurting the millions of followers of Islam throughout the world. Though he and many of his supporters call this as an act of “freedom of speech”, they failed to reason as to why only Prophet Muhammad’s(SAW) was considered.

Their aim is crystal clear, they only want to create ruckus and anger among 1.5 billion muslims across the globe, to malign the image of our beloved Prophet Muhammad’s(SAW) image.

 They almost succeeded in their efforts but thanks to muslims all over the world and specially to Pakistan Government that they without an iota delay, protested to this event. Pakistani government took a very good step in devising a temporarily ban to facebook, youtube and some other such websites that were the communication mode of the drawing event.

There are many other media sites also give lot about this news

http://savealihassan.wordpress.com/

http://propakistani.pk/2010/05/18/breaking-facebook-is-going-to-get-banned-in-pakistan/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/7740295/Facebook-blocked-in-Pakistan-over-Prophet-Mohammed-cartoon-row.html

http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/stop-everybody-draw-mohammad-day/sign.html
http://www.drawmuhammadday.net/
........ And many more....

Interview With Mr.Badoo (Ali Hasan) On Air Radio Live

Radio Jokey:John Matthews
Mr.Badoo:Ali Hasan

 ~ Download Interview

We have the power of e-media. Spread this as much as possible through blogs, youtube videos, discussion threads, forums, communities. Make it so frequent and often that in every search query of google, our messages are displayed, everywhere. Mr.Badoo(Ali) needs us, we must not step back.

Remember, we will be questioned by Allah what we did to support our brother when he stood alone for us. Let us not make ourself sinners for that day. Please do stand, our brother needs us. Don’t step back.

May Allah give us hidayah courage to stand for our brother and brother Ali the courage to stand against the biased peoples.