Humble Bundle Announces ‘Hacker’ Pay-What-You-Want Sale

An anonymous reader writes: Humble Bundle announced a special “pay what you want” sale for four ebooks from No Starch Press, with proceeds going to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (or to the charity of your choice). This “hacker edition” sale includes two relatively new titles from 2015 — “Automate the Boring Stuff with Python” and Violet Blue’s “Smart Girl’s Guide to Privacy, ” as well as “Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering” by Andrew “bunnie” Huang, and “The Linux Command Line”. Hackers who are willing to pay “more than the average” — currently $14.87 — can also unlock a set of five more books, which includes “The Maker’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse: Defend Your Base with Simple Circuits, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi”. (This level also includes “Bitcoin for the Befuddled” and “Designing BSD Rootkits: An Introduction to Kernel Hacking”.) And at the $15 level — just 13 cents more — four additional books are unlocked. “Practical Malware Analysis: The Hands-On Guide to Dissecting Malicious Software” is available at this level, as well as “Hacking: The Art of Exploitation” and “Black Hat Python.” Nice to see they’ve already sold 28, 506 bundles, which are DRM-free and available in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI format. (I still remember Slashdot’s 2012 interview with Make magazine’s Andrew “bunnie” Huang, who Samzenpus described as “one of the most famous hardware and software hackers in the world.”) Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Humble Bundle Announces ‘Hacker’ Pay-What-You-Want Sale

Hacker’s Account of How He Took Down Hacking Team’s Servers

An anonymous reader writes: FinFisher, the hacker that broke into Italian firm Hacking Team, has published a step-by-step account of how he carried out the attacks, what tools he used, and what he learned from scouting HackingTeam’s network. Published on PasteBin, the attack’s timeline reveals he entered their network through a zero-day exploit in an (unnamed) embedded device, accessed a MongoDB database that had no password, discovered backups in the database, found a BES admin password in the backups, and eventually got admin access to the Windows Domain Server. From here, it was easy to reach into their email server and steal all the company’s emails, and later access Git repos and steal the source code of their surveillance software. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Hacker’s Account of How He Took Down Hacking Team’s Servers

A Virus Has Forced an Entire Hospital Chain to Shut Down Its Computers

Hackers and hospital computers are a bad mix , as a string of attacks has been proving. The latest victim is MedStar Health, a company that operates a chain of hospitals around the Baltimore and Washington area. Read more…

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A Virus Has Forced an Entire Hospital Chain to Shut Down Its Computers

U.S. Indicts 7 Iranians Accused of Hacking U.S. Financial Institutions

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The U.S. Department of Justice has indicted seven Iranians with intelligence links over a series of crippling cyberattacks against 46 U.S. financial institutions between 2011 and 2013. The indictment, which was unsealed Thursday, also accuses one of the Iranians of remotely accessing the control system of a small dam in Rye, N.Y, during the same period. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the indictment is meant to send a message: “That we will not allow any individual, group, or nation to sabotage American financial institutions or undermine the integrity of fair competition in the operation of the free market.” According to the indictment, the seven men worked for two Iran-based computer security companies that have done work for the Iranian government, including the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The men allegedly carried out large-scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which overwhelm a server with communications in order to disable it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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U.S. Indicts 7 Iranians Accused of Hacking U.S. Financial Institutions

How The Nissan Leaf Can Be Hacked Via Web Browser From Anywhere In The World

What if a car could be controlled from a computer halfway around the world? Computer security researcher and hacker Troy Hunt has managed to do just that, via a web browser and an Internet connection, with an unmodified Nissan Leaf in another country. While so far the control was limited to the HVAC system, it’s a revealing demonstration of what’s possible. Read more…

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How The Nissan Leaf Can Be Hacked Via Web Browser From Anywhere In The World

Computer Analysis Reveals the Stunning Complexity of the Star Wars Expanded Universe

The Star Wars expanded universe is huge. Really huge. Like, you just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly huge it really is. To grasp the full extent of this hugeness, a team of data scientists used a new computer program to analyze it, revealing some unexpected things about the extended saga. Read more…

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Computer Analysis Reveals the Stunning Complexity of the Star Wars Expanded Universe

63,000 College Students Hacked at University of Central Florida 

At least 63, 000 current and former students at the University of Central Florida are getting bad news this week: Someone breached the school’s network to access their social security numbers and other sensitive personal data. Read more…

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63,000 College Students Hacked at University of Central Florida 

The Horrifying Vtech Hack Let Someone Download Thousands of Photos of Children

The latest details about a recent security breach at a kids’ toy company are in, and they are disturbing. A couple weeks ago, hackers successfully broke into the servers of connected toy maker Vtech and stole the personal information of nearly 5 million parents and over 200, 000 kids. What we didn’t know until now: The hackers stole pictures of kids, too. Read more…

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The Horrifying Vtech Hack Let Someone Download Thousands of Photos of Children