anonymous

In the news today, Apple's subscription rules raise hackles among developers, us, and possibly the Justice Department; meanwhile, Verizon iPhone sales appear to disappoint. Is Apple having a bad day? It's probably just solar flares. Also, the Motorola Xoom price is announced: not that bad. Nokia delays its Windows-based phones to sometime after October: very bad. Worse, even. And we're getting pretty worried about Anonymous, the Internet's own unstoppable secret police. Maybe Watson can save us. --Molly

A security firm investigating the people behind the recent Anonymous cyberattacks on various Web sites has become a victim of the group's exploits.

Information security research firm HBGary Federal, which said that it had been working with the FBI to identify the leaders of Anonymous, saw its Web site hacked and the Twitter account of its CEO, Aaron Barr, compromised yesterday by the group.

"Today we taught everyone a lesson. When we actually decide to bite back against those who try to bring us down, we bite hard," Anonymous tweeted on Barr's hacked Twitter page.

Beyond … Read more

The group Anonymous has issued a warning to the U.K. government after five men suspected of having connections to the group were arrested yesterday.

The group, which has claimed responsibility for a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks launched in support of whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks, said it viewed the arrests as a "declaration of war" by the British authorities.

"Anonymous believes...that pursuing this direction is a sad mistake on your behalf. Not only does it reveal the fact that you do not seem to understand the present-day political and technological reality, we also … Read more

The FBI is on the hunt for the hackers responsible for a recent wave of cyberattacks launched in defense of WikiLeaks.

FBI agents yesterday executed more than 40 search warrants in the United States as part of their ongoing investigation. Pointing to the group Anonymous, which has taken responsibility for the attacks, the FBI said that the distributed denial of service (DDoS) assaults were facilitated by software the group makes available as free downloads.

Late last year, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, and other companies were hit by DDoS attacks triggered by activists in support of WikiLeaks after the companies cut off … Read more

Police in England have arrested five young men on suspicion of taking part in distributed denial-of-service attacks launched by Anonymous, the group that has targeted corporate sites for attack in defense of WikiLeaks.

The five, aged 15 to 26, were detained at 7am local time today at addresses in the West Midlands, Northamptonshire, Hertfordshire, Surrey, and London, the Metropolitan Police Central eCrime Unit said in a statement. The suspects were taken to local police stations and remain in custody.

The Anonymous group of activists undertook a number of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks last year, using a tool called the Low … Read more

The FBI has seized a server in Texas as part of its hunt for the groups behind the pro-WikiLeaks denial-of-service attacks launched in December against PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, and others, according to a report.

During a December 16 raid, agents seized a server at Tailor Made Services, a Dallas-based co-location, or server-hosting, facility, and copied two of its hard drives, according to The Smoking Gun Web site, which said it has obtained the FBI affidavit in support of a search warrant for the seizure.

It's not clear what was found on the drives, The Smoking Gun reported, saying that … Read more

Hackers are increasingly hitting the Web sites of human rights and independent media groups in an attempt to silence them, says a new study released this week by Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Based on a survey of 45 groups, the report "Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Against Independent Media and Human Rights Sites" found that a large percentage said they've been targeted by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks from those who disagree with their viewpoints. The Web sites typically have been knocked offline for short periods of time but in some cases have … Read more

Kenley is back on The 404 today to announce the winner of our Nerd of the Year contest, and Stupid Andy is the victor!

Stupid Andy is a closet geek, so even though you might mistake him for a regular guy, he's well versed in audio/visual languages which I think puts him in the category of nerd, according to this article comparing the two.

Time has announced its Person of the Year for 2010, and although Justin Bieber, the Chilean miners, and the Tea Party all came close, Mark Zuckerberg clinched the title of the person who Time describes as "for better or for worse...has done the most to influence the events of the year."

With Zuckerberg in the cockpit, Facebook has changed the way we communicate and consume news, but we have to question whether the release of "The Social Network" had anything to do with the nomination.

Plenty of Gawker accounts were compromised as a result of last weekend's Gnosis breach, and we learn on today's show that even some of our fellow CNET colleagues were affected by the hack! 

We also take a look at a graph of the top 50 Gawker Media passwords that are now posted online for public consumption. Clearly people just don't care about their commenting passwords on the site, because the first 10 are all lazy keyboard strokes  like "123456," "abc123," and "qwerty." On the stranger side, "monkey," "consumer," "superman," and just the number "0" were all identified as popular passwords.

In the face of disaster, the smart thing to do is adapt and move on, so check out this Lifehacker guide to reassessing your online security measures. The page suggests using a free password manager called LastPass that generates complex passwords for you, stores them on a network, and even audits them to make sure they're not easy to guess.

Narcs around the world have been waiting for a Big Brother app for the iPhone, and now it's here. It's called the PatriotApp, and it deputizes any iPhone user (pending a 99-cent fee) with the ability to report a number of crimes directly to the appropriate governmental agency. It links your iPhone to organizations like the FBI, the EPA, and the CDC so you can report things like government waste, environmental crimes, white-collar crimes, and public health concerns on the fly, but it just seems like a professional tool to snitch on your neighbor. Finally, you can also use the app to post your claims to Twitter and Facebook, so all your friends can be aware of your citizen's arrests.

Remember Daniel, our friend who visited The 404 studio last March? He left us this video voice mail telling us about the current fashion trends blanketing his middle school. Congratulations on your graduation, buddy--be sure to tell all your new high school friends about The 404!

Akamai managers say they could have bolstered the Web sites that buckled under attacks launched recently by Internet vigilantes.

The world's largest content delivery network says it has enough servers and the right kind of network to "mitigate distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks," Neil Cohen, Akamai's senior director of product marketing told CNET. DDoS describes the practice of overwhelming a Web site with traffic so that it can't be accessed.

Some well-known sites were the targets of DDoS attacks launched by a loosely connected group of WikiLeaks supporters who call themselves Anonymous or Anon for short. … Read more