Harvard website hacked by Syria protesters. 26 September 2011Last updated at 18:17 By Sean Coughlan BBC News education correspondent Harvard's website carried a message from the "Syrian Electronic Army" Harvard University has had its website hacked in what appears to be a "sophisticated" Syrian-related attack. Along with a picture of Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, the hacked home page showed a message saying the "Syrian Electronic Army Were Here".
A further message made terror threats against the United States and criticised its opposition to the Assad regime. Harvard said this has been the work of a "sophisticated individual or group". "The university's homepage was compromised by an outside party this morning. The website was hacked on Monday morning by what appeared to be sympathisers of President Assad of Syria, with a picture of the president in military uniform appearing in front of a Syrian flag.
Violence threat It told readers: "This site has been breached to spread our message even if illegally. " High Profile Email Accounts That Have Been Hacked - Clckd :: Share The Links You Love. Site Down! Major Websites That Have Felt The Wrath of Anonymous. The infamous vigilante hacker group ‘Anonymous’ has become the modern-day Robin Hood of the Internet.
Their way of ‘stealing from the rich’ however, is to shut down websites of anyone they see as enemies of their cause (i.e. enemies of freedom of speech and freedom of information). The ‘collective super-consciousness’ as they are referred to, do not have a leader or operate under any hierarchy. They aren’t even necessarily hackers. Many Anonymous members believe in a cause and volunteer their computers to help bring down websites. Anonymous first garnered national attention when they took on the Church of Scientology, shutting down their website then protesting in Guy Fawkes masks outside their headquarters. Here are some of the recent major websites that have suffered the wrath of Anonymous. PostFinance, Bank of America, PayPal, eBay, MasterCard, Visa When: December 2010Motivation: Messing with WikiLeaks Image Source: Servant of Chaos Westboro Baptist Church BMI.com HBGary Koch Industries.
The 'Worm' That Could Bring Down The Internet. iStockphoto.com For the past three years, a highly encrypted computer worm called Conficker has been spreading rapidly around the world. As many as 12 million computers have been infected with the self-updating worm, a type of malware that can get inside computers and operate without their permission. "What Conficker does is penetrate the core of the [operating system] of the computer and essentially turn over control of your computer to a remote controller," writer Mark Bowden tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "[That person] could then utilize all of these computers, including yours, that are connected. ... And you have effectively the largest, most powerful computer in the world. " The gigantic networked system created by the Conficker worm is what's known as a "botnet. " The Conficker botnet is powerful enough to take over computer networks that control banking, telephones, security systems, air traffic control and even the Internet itself, says Bowden.
Courtesy of the author. MySQL.com Hacked to Serve Malware. The website for the open-source MySQL database was hacked and used to serve malware to visitors Monday. Security vendor Armorize noticed the problem at around 5 a.m. Pacific Time Monday. Hackers had installed JavaScript code that threw a variety of known browser attacks at visitors to the site, so those with out-of-date browsers or unpatched versions of Adobe Flash, Reader or Java on their Windows PCs could have been quietly infected with malicious software. By just after 11 a.m., the issue had been cleaned up, said Wayne Huang, Armorize's CEO. He thinks the malicious code was on the site for less than a day. Huang said that the attackers used the Black Hole exploit kit to attack visitors to the site, but his team had not yet figured out what the malicious software that it installed was designed to do.
Oracle, which manages the MySQL.com project, was still investigating the issue and unable to comment for this story Monday.