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5 Of The World’s Most Famous Hackers & What Happened To Them There are two types of hackers. First, you’ve got the kind that is so often portrayed by Hollywood as an anti-social nerd with a chip on his shoulder out to dominate the cyberworld by breaking into secure networks and messing things up. Second, you’ve got the kind of people who just enjoy fiddling around with software source code and hardware gigs. That’s right. The term “hacker” originally referred to the second type, which held absolutely no malevolent connotations. Only recently has the term been used to refer primarily to criminal masterminds. There are good hackers and bad hackers ! Nowadays, benevolent hackers are often called “white hats” while the more sinister are called “black hats.” In this article, I’ll be talking specifically about famous hackers that don hats of black. Here are five of the most widely known black hatters and what happened to them for their recklessness. Jonathan James J...

5 Of The World’s Most Famous Hackers & What Happened To Them Written by Joel Lee June 1, 2012 Ads by Google There are two types of hackers. First, you’ve got the kind that is so often portrayed by Hollywood as an anti-social nerd with a chip on his shoulder out to dominate the cyberworld by breaking into secure networks and messing things up. Second, you’ve got the kind of people who just enjoy fiddling around with software source code and hardware gigs. That’s right. The term “hacker” originally referred to the second type, which held absolutely no malevolent connotations. Only recently has the term been used to refer primarily to criminal masterminds. There are good hackers and bad hackers ! Nowadays, benevolent hackers are often called “white hats” while the more sinister ar...

Employee Stole 'Yandex Search Engine' Source Code, Tried to Sell it for Just $29K A former employee of Russian search engine Yandex allegedly stole the source code and key algorithms for its search engine site and then attempted to sell them on the black market to fund his own startup. Russian publication Kommersant reports that Dmitry Korobov downloaded a type of software nicknamed " Arcadia " from Yandex's servers, which contained highly critical information, including the source code and some of the "key algorithms," of its search engine. Korobov then tried to sell the stolen codes to an electronics retailer called NIX, where a friend of his allegedly worked, and on the dark underground market in search of potential buyers. But What's the Punchline? The funniest part is that Korobov requested only $25,000 and 250,000 rubles (a total of almost $29,000) for Yandex's sourc...

Jail Authorities Mistakenly Early Released 3,200 Prisoners due to a Silly Software Bug Washington State Department of Corrections (DoC) is facing an investigation after it early released around 3,200 prisoners per year , since 2002, when a bug was introduced in the software used to calculate time credits for inmates' good behavior. The software glitch led to a miscalculation of sentence reductions that US prisoners were receiving for their good behaviour. Over the next 13 years, the median number of days of those released early from prison was 49 days before their correct release date. "This problem was allowed to continue for 13 years is deeply disappointing to me, totally unacceptable and, frankly, maddening," Washington State Governor Jay Inslee said in a statement. "I've [many] questions about how and why this happened, and I understand that members of the public will have those same queries....

Hyatt Hotel Says Payment Systems Hacked with Credit-Card Stealing Malware Hyatt Hotels Corporation is notifying its customers that credit card numbers and other sensitive information may have been stolen after it found malware on the computers that process customer payments. "We recently identified malware on computers that operate the payment processing systems for Hyatt-managed locations," the company announced on Wednesday. "As soon as we discovered the activity, we launched an investigation and engaged leading third-party cyber security experts." What type of information? The company didn't confirm whether the attackers succeeded in stealing payment card numbers, neither it say how long its network was infected or how many hotel chains were affected in the malware attack. But as the payment processing system was infected with credit-card-stealing malware, there is a possibility that h...

Want WhatsApp Free Video Calling? This Leaked Screenshot Reveals Upcoming Feature Raise your hands if you want Free Video Calling feature in WhatsApp. I am in, and I think most of you people. And the good news is that it looks like WhatsApp's much-awaited Free Video Calling feature is on its way, according to the recently leaked screenshots. Free Video Calling Feature in WhatsApp German technology blog Macerkopf.de has posted what it claims are screenshots from an unreleased version of the popular messaging client WhatsApp for iOS. The screenshots are from an unreleased version of the software ( version 2.12.16.2 ), which is currently being tested internally, but at present it is not clear whether or not those screenshots are legitimate. But, if the leaked screenshots are real, and WhatsApp adds the Free Video Calling feature , then the company could take an enormous bite out of some of its top r...

Somebody Offered Money to Raspberry Pi Foundation for Pre-Installing Malware The Raspberry Pi is now gaining attention from malware distributors who want the popular mini-computers to deliver with pre-install malware. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has made a shocking revelation that the charitable foundation has been offered money to install malware onto the Raspberry Pi machines before they were shipped out to users. The Raspberry Pi is an extremely simple computer that looks and feels very basic, but could be built into many geeky projects. Due to the low-cost appeal of the Raspberry Pi, the Foundation has sold over 4 million units. Just Last month, Raspberry Pi unveiled its latest wonder: The Raspberry Pi Zero – a programmable computer that costs just $5 (or £4), may rank as the world's cheapest computer. Last Wednesday, the Foundation tweeted a screenshot of an email in which " business officer...

Bitcoin Core Developers Quit Bitcoin Project to Launch a New Digital Currency Some of Bitcoin’s Core developers have left the Bitcoin project and started building their separate cryptocurrency called DECRED . Decred aims to prevent the issues Bitcoin is currently facing regarding project governance and development funding. CEO of ' Company 0 ', Mr. Jacob Yocom-Piatt , who has funded Bitcoin development since early 2013, said the actual development of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency is funded by external entities that forms a conflict of interests between the groups and the project's core developers. According to Bitcoin's developers, these group puts limitations on input in Bitcoin's governance, selecting options that are favorable to their own interests only, and generally ignoring the developers' and project's best interests. "The Bitcoin software is controlled by a small grou...

LoopHole in PayPal Terms Allows Anyone to Double PayPal Money Endlessly Many of us own a PayPal account for easy online transactions, but most of us don’t have balance in our PayPal Account. But what will happen if your money doubles, triple...or even more folds in just some couple of hours ?? Sounds cherishing!! A loophole in the popular digital payment and money transfer service, PayPal allows its users to double the money in their account and that too endlessly. That means with only $50 in your PayPal account, you can make it to $100, then $100 to directly $200 and so on. An eBay owned company, PayPal provides a faster and safer way to pay and get paid. The service gives people simpler ways to send money without sharing financial information, with over 148 million active accounts in 26 currencies and across 193 markets, thereby processing more than 9 million payments daily. According to TinKode a.k.a Razvan Cernaianu , who claimed to...

Like it or not, Microsoft Plans to Push Windows 10 Upgrade more Aggressively This is no surprise that Microsoft wants you to install Windows 10. But, Hey Microsoft, Not everyone wants to upgrade to Windows 10. Many people are happy with Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 OS and don’t want to switch to the newest Windows 10 operating system. Days after the launch of Windows 10, Microsoft started offering Free Windows 10 installation to every Windows user. The marketing strategy successfully worked for Microsoft and just within a week after the launch, Windows 10 started running on millions of PCs. Then the company went into planning other tricks in order to get on to the maximum number of PCs as possible. It silently started pushing Windows 10 installation files on PCs running Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, even if users have not opted into the upgrade. Also Read: Reminder! If You Haven't yet, Turn Off Windows 10 Keylogger Now . Less t...

Over 20Gbps DDoS attacks Now Become Common for Hackers The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack has become more sophisticated and complex and therefore has become one of the favorite weapon for the cyber criminals to temporarily suspend the services of any host connected to the Internet and till now nearly every big site had been a victim of this attack, from WordPress to online game websites. According to the new report released by a US based security solutions provider Incapsula , DDOS activities have become threefold since the start of the year 2013, pointing the key source of trash traffic to be the remotely controlled “ zombie army ” that can be used to flood various websites by DDoS attacks and other malicious activities. The report site as “ DDOS Threat Landscape ”, explains that almost one in every three DDoS attacks is above 20Gbps and 81% of attacks feature multiple vector threats. The attackers are becomi...

Someone Just Tried to Take Down Internet's Backbone with 5 Million Queries/Sec Someone just DDoSed one of the most critical organs of the Internet anatomy – The Internet's DNS Root Servers . Early last week, a flood of as many as 5 Million queries per second hit many of the Internet's DNS ( Domain Name System ) Root Servers that act as the authoritative reference for mapping domain names to IP addresses and are a total of 13 in numbers. The attack, commonly known as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, took place on two separate occasions. The first DDoS attack to the Internet's backbone root servers launched on November 30 that lasted 160 minutes ( almost 3 hours ), and the second one started on December 1 that lasted almost an hour. Massive Attacks Knocked Many of the 13 Root Servers Offline The DDoS attack was able to knock 3 out of the 13 DNS root servers of the Internet offline for a couple of hou...