geekosystem

They shoot hackers, don't they? Well, not yet, but give cyber warfare some time to get its feet and that could change. A new report commissioned by NATO finds that applying the rules of conventional war to cyber warfare makes sense, meaning that countries could be in the clear as far as international law is concerned if they strike beck against virtual attacks with real life force.

You probably figured our Today In Geek History series would cover only science events. You figured wrong! The gaming world has a colorful history, too. For example, on this day in 1990, armed Secret Service agents raided the Austin, Texas offices of Steve Jackson Games, the game company that published GURPS (Generic Universal RolePlaying System) but is perhaps best known in the community for the card game Munchkin. So why the raid? They were looking for a hacker. Sound familiar?

Which are you more afraid of: Internet anarchists or Big Brother? Tonight, the live Internet feed of President Obama's State of the Union address may just get blocked by Anonymous, who've declared they would do so. Check the Internet tonight at 9PM Eastern Standard Time to find out if it really happens, but read on to find out why.

Love them or hate them, you already know that flesh-eating zombies have been shambling roughshod through pop culture these days. Surely, the more we see them on the screen, the less we would believe in them -- except perhaps for those Great Falls, Montana residents who were spooked by yesterday's  TV-broadcast warning "that the dead of are rising from the grave."

Not to be confused with Gaben, which refers to Valve head Gabe Newell, Gabon is a sovereign state located in Africa which just so happens to control the .ga top-level domain. Because Kim Dotcom is clearly a clever wordsmith, it was announced that the upcoming successor to MegaUpload would be called "Mega" and -- you guessed it -- exist at the Me.ga address. It looks like that's not going to happen, though, as both the Gabon government and an anonymous group of hackers have pulled the plug on Me.ga before the service even had a chance to launch.

In case you missed it, Google just hosted their Pwnium 2 competition at the Hack In The Box conference in Malaysia. Like the name implies, this is the second such competition hosted by the search engine giant in order to improve the security in their Google Chrome browser. Pinkie Pie, for the second time this year, won the $60,000 prize for successfully producing the first Chrome vulnerability at the conference. Sadly, the name is just a handle, but we couldn't resist the above image.

Not too long ago, the High Court ruled U.K. ISPs must block access to The Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay responded, suggesting easily implementable methods to get around the block, but that didn't stop Virgin Media from complying with the court order and swiftly enacting the block. In response to that, hackers attacked the Virgin Media website, getting it taken offline for a short while. Somewhat surprisingly, The Pirate Bay spoke out against the attack.

Late last month, the private information of people within the Utah medicaid system was accessed by nefarious hackers. The initial numbers of around 180,000 people affected were troubling enough, but those have ballooned several times over. The Utah Department of Health is now reporting that 280,000 people had their Social Security Numbers exposed and an additional 500,000 had less sensitive information -- such as names and addresses -- accessed.

Money may not be able to buy happiness, but it sure can buy a lot of other things. Google has recently been exploiting this fact by using it to buy hackers, essentially. After offering $1 million in prizes to potential hackers as a part of their Pwnium contest, Google is going to have to pay up, about which I'm sure they're happy. On the very first day, Russian University student Sergey Glazunov cracked Chrome wide open, snagging a $60,000 prize, marking the first time Chrome has been hacked in a public competition. He wasn't the only one to pull it off either.

A lot has changed since last summer when the Lulz were abundant and the hacking was easy. LulzSec, insane mascot of Internet chaos, sailed off into the sunset, returned, and faded away again. Anonymous continued to pepper government sites with scattered DDoS attacks, though with less and less frequency, and the affected government organizations continued to swat at their Anonymous attackers, with increasing success. But there was more to it than all that, something that has only just come to light. It seems that Sabu, the figurehead of LulzSec, actually defected late in the summer of 2011 and has been working for the FBI ever since, and now it's become clear that he played an important role in the latest series of hacker arrests.

Most of us probably don't give much thought to the digital encryption systems that keep our personal information, well, personal. If you do, you probably know more about it than I do. That said, the news that encryption keys can be stolen from smartphones by would-be nefarious hackers using only a nearby AM radio sets off all sorts of alarm bells in my head. Fortunately, no one has fallen victim to this technique, and the exploit's discoverers at Cryptography Research hope to keep it that way.

Hacker collective TeaMp0isoN has leaked account information -- email addresses and passwords -- after hacking the United Nations. The accounts belong to individuals spread throughout groups within the United Nations, such as the United Nations Development Programme, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and others. On their Pastebin dump, TeaMpoisoN noted that some of the user ids had blank passwords, something that is even ridiculous for your mom's junk email account to employ, much less a United Nations organization account.

In 2007 and 2008, two U.S. satellites experienced strange interference on several occasions. The anomalies didn't last, the longest period being just twelve minutes. However, a draft report from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission says that what the satellites experienced was an attempt to take control of the spacecraft by hackers on the ground, and names China as the most likely candidate. The two satellites were Earth observing craft and were not involved in any national security operations. The first, the Landsat-7 satellite operated by the U.S. Geological Survey, encountered interference in October 2007 and June 2008. The second craft, the NASA operated Terra AM-1, had its bout of interference in June and October of 2008. The commission's report claims that this interference was a failed attempt by a ground station to "lock on" to the satellite in order to send it commands. According to the report, the attack utilized the Svalbard Satellite Station in Spitsbergen, Norway. While the claims made by the report are quite troubling in their own right, the report itself is disconcertingly short on information.

Security researcher Patrick Dunstan has released his findings on Apple's latest operating system OS 10.7, aka Lion, and it doesn't look good. He found that if provided with physical access, a nefarious person could recover administrator passwords, or even change those passwords, without any special privileges. Here's how password security is supposed to work on a Mac: Passwords are stored in "shadow files" which are buried deep in the system's file structure, and only accessible by someone logged in with an administrator password. Dunstan's research has shown, however, that in the new version of the operating system, these files can be accessed by any user and passwords extracted. More troubling is his discovery that, with a little prodding, someone with access to the computer's Terminal command line app can change the administrator's password themselves.

I'm starting to get bored with writing this same story every few days, so here's a Mad Lib that'll help you feel my pain. Consider it an experiment in post-modern journalism. Earlier today, hackers associated with [high-profile hacker group] hacked into the servers of [organization] and compromised [number] gigabytes of data as revenge for [organization's anti-hacking security measures]. The stolen data is reported to contain personal information about employees of [organization] as well as information pertaining to [organization's] relationship with [other organizations or governments]. The leaked data, which is being distributed by torrent, also came with a strongly worded Pastebin statement from [high-profile hacker group] that states that [organizations's anti-hacking security measures] will do nothing to stop [high-profile hacking group] and may, in fact, encourage them. As of yet, it's questionable whether the data that was obtained is accurate and up-to-date, but either way, it is still an embarrassment for [organization] that their efforts to stop [high-profile hacking group] have been largely ineffective on the whole and actually left them open to attack. We'll see whether or not the data leak will have any long-lasting effects, but for the moment [organization] will have to just lick its wounds and reevaluate their security before going after hackers again. Word bank below.