Most Recent

Top 10 Infamous Student Hackers Ever
Top 10 Infamous Student Hackers Ever

1.) Sven Jaschan:

In the words of one tech expert, “His name will always be associated with some of the biggest viruses in the history of the Internet.” The viruses: the Sasser and NetSky worms that infected millions of computers and have caused millions of dollars of damage since their release in 2004. The man behind the viruses proved to be not even a man at all, legally. Seventeen-year-old hacker Sven Jaschan, a student at a computer science school in Germany, claimed to have created the viruses to become a hero by developing a program that would eradicate the rampaging Mydoom and Bagle bugs. Instead he found himself the subject of a $250,000 bounty courtesy of Microsoft, for which some of his classmates turned him in.


2.) Jonathan James:

In 2000, at the age of 16, James, or “C0mrade” as he was known in the hacker community, infamously became the first juvenile federally sentenced for hacking. The targets of his notorious hack jobs were a wing of the U.S. Department of Defense called the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, NASA, and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. (By hacking the latter James gained the ability to control the A/C in the International Space Station.) All of these were pulled off “for fun” while James was still a student at Palmetto Senior High in Miami. Unfortunately, the fun ran out when James was tied into a massive identity theft investigation. Though insisting he was innocent, James took his own life, saying he had “no faith in the justice system.”


3.) Michael Calce:

Yahoo. CNN. Ebay. Amazon. Dell.com. One by one in a matter of days, these huge websites crashed at the hands of 15-year-old Canadian high school student Michael Calce, aka “MafiaBoy.” Armed with a denial-of-service program he called “Rivolta” that overloaded servers he targeted, the young hacker wreaked $7.5 million in damages, according to court filings. Calce was caught when he fell victim to a common ailment of teenage boys: bragging. The cops were turned on to him when he began boasting in chat rooms about being responsible for the attacks. On Sept. 12, 2001, MafiaBoy was sentenced to a group facility for eight months on 56 counts of cybercrime.


4.) Kevin Mitnick:

Before performing hacks that prompted the U.S. Department of Justice to declare him “the most wanted computer criminal in United States history,” Kevin Mitnick had already made a name for himself as a hacker in his school days, first at Monroe High School in LA and later at USC. On a dare, Mitnick connived an opening into the computer system of Digital Equipment Corporation, which some fellow hackers then used to steal proprietary source code from the company before ratting on him. While still on probation for that crime, Mitnick broke into the premises of Pacific Bell and had to go on the run from police in the aftermath, during which time he hacked dozens of systems, including those of IBM, Nokia, Motorola, and Fujitsu.


5.) Tim Berners-Lee:

“Scandalous” is a synonym for “infamous,” and for this legendary computer scientist, knight of the British Empire, and inventor of the World Wide Web to have been a hacker in his school days is certainly a juicy factoid. During his time at Oxford in the mid-’70s, Sir Tim was banned from using university computers after he and a friend were caught hacking their way into restricted digital areas. Luckily by that time he already knew how to make his own computer out of a soldering iron, an old TV, and some spare parts. And also luckily for him, he will always be revered as the father of the Internet.


6.) Neal Patrick and the 414s:

In the early ’80s, hacking was still a relatively foreign concept to most Americans. Few recognized the enormous power hackers could hijack with a few strokes on a keyboard, which explains why a young group of hackers known as the 414s (after a Milwaukee area code) were virtual celebrities after they hacked into the famous Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and elsewhere. While today hacking a lab where classified nuclear research is conducted could earn you a one-way ticket to Guantanamo, the 17-year-old ringleader and high school student Neal Patrick was on the cover of Newsweek. The group members got light sentences but prompted Congress to take a stronger role in cybercrime.


7.) Robert T. Morris:

The first ever Internet worm, the Morris Worm derived its name from Cornell grad student Robert Tappan Morris. In 1988, Morris released the worm through MIT’s system to cover his tracks, which would seem to contradict his claims that he meant no harm with it. But that’s exactly what resulted: the worm spread out of control, infecting more than 6,000 computers connected to the ARPANET, the academic forerunner to the World Wide Web. The damages reached as high as an estimated $10 million, and Morris earned the ignominious distinction of being the first person prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Morris got community service but was apparently not considered too infamous to be offered his current job as a professor at MIT.


8.) George Hotz:

To some, George Hotz (aka “geohot,” aka “million75,” aka “mil”) is a public menace, a threat to electronic businesses everywhere. To many, Hotz is a hero. The high-schooler shot to fame/infamy in 2007 at the tender age of 17 by giving the world its first hacked, or “jailbroken” iPhone. He traded it for a new sports car and three new iPhones, and the video of the hacking received millions of hits. Apple has had to grudgingly come to terms with jailbreaking, seeing as the courts have declared it legal, but Sony Corp. is definitely not OK with such tampering. When Hotz hacked his PlayStation 3 and published the how-to on the web, the company launched a vicious lawsuit against him. In turn, the hacker group Anonymous launched an attack on Sony, stealing millions of users’ personal info.


9.) Donncha O’Cearbhaill:

According to the FBI, this 19-year-old freshman at Trinity College Dublin is one of the top five most wanted hackers in the world. Well, he was; now that he’s been arrested he’s not really “wanted” anymore. The Feds contend the young man is a VIP member of the Anonymous and LulzSec hacking groups that have already been mentioned and whose targets have included the FBI, the U.S. Senate, and Sony (in the Hotz backlash). It seems “Palladium” (O’Cearbhaill) took the liberty of listening in on a conference call between the FBI and several international police forces who were discussing their investigations of the hacking groups. He could be sentenced to up to 15 years in prison if convicted for that hack alone.


10.) Nicholas Allegra:

Just as George Hotz moved on from the Apple hacking game, Brown University student Nicholas Allegra is also hanging up his jersey. “Comex,” as he is known to millions of rooted iPhone fans, created the simple-to-use Apple iOS jailbreaking program JailbreakMe in 2007 and has since released two newer versions of it. However, Comex seems to have gone over to the dark side, accepting an internship with the very company whose products he became famous exploiting. Still, Allegra’s hacking skills are so advanced (one author puts him five years ahead of the authors of the infamous Stuxnet worm that corrupted Iran’s nuclear facilities) and so many people availed themselves of his talents, he will forever live in hacking infamy. 

takecy 9/10/2012
Download Bitdefender Safebox 1.0
Bitdefender Safebox 1.0

These days, people work across a variety of different platforms: computers, mobile phones and tablets. Ensuring the latest version of your data travels with you can be tricky if you rely on manually copying it between devices, which is why so many of today’s cloud-based backup tools also work by synchronising data between supported devices.

Online backup solutions are ten-a-penny these days, which is why Bitdefender’s Safebox feels like it’s a little late to the party. It works on Windows and Android, with iPad and iPhone support coming shortly, and offers 2GB free online storage space, with paid-for solutions offering up to 60GB of online storage a year.

It’s simple enough to use: install the free app, sign up for a free account, log in and then start selecting which files you want to back up. Once selected, initial copies are uploaded to your secure online account – encrypted of course – ready for synchronising to other computers and devices (just sign in with the same account details, then choose what to sync), accessing via a web browser (log in at https://my.bitdefender.com/en_us/safebox), or sharing securely with selected others, such as family and friends.

It’s all very efficient – changes to files are immediately uploaded to the server, and you can easily restore previous versions of files simply by right-clicking the file in Windows itself. The user interface is simple and uncluttered and it does what it says on the tin.

Unfortunately, so do so many other online backup services, and there’s nothing here to make Bitdefender Safebox stand out from the crowd. Most other services offer the same sync, share and backup tools, encrypt your data, work across multiple platforms (including Mac) and offer free accounts – in the case of AVG LiveKive and SugarSync, you get 5GB, while the forthcoming Windows 8 will have Windows Live SkyDrive built right into the interface, which currently offers up to 25GB free storage, admittedly most of which is currently only accessible through your web browser.

What Safebox does have going for it is simplicity, but it’s not enough on its own to make it the must-have cloud backup product, particularly if you’re already signed up with someone else. via downloadcrew

takecy 3/17/2012
How To Install Windows 8

How To Install Windows 8 - I spent almost the entire day playing around with Windows 8 and finally installed it on all the three machines that I have – two of them were previously running Windows 7 while the third one is an iMac running Mac OS X Lion. Everything just worked without any issues.

The first Windows machine is sort of test machine and I therefore installed Windows 8 as the primary OS on that machine overwriting Windows 7. All my previous files, Windows settings and programs were preserved and it was quite an effortless installation.

The second Windows machine is my primary computer, the one that I am using to write this story inside Windows Live Writer, and I therefore installed Windows 8 on another partition (dual-boot setup). Thus my existing Windows 7 installation is not modified in any way while I can switch to Windows 8 anytime with a simple restart.

In the case of iMac, I created a new NTFS partition and installed Windows 8 using Boot Camp. The metro tiles of Windows 8 on the 27” iMac look absolutely gorgeous and the Apple keyboard and Magic Mouse also work inside Windows 8.

Finally, I installed Windows 8 as a Virtual Machine inside Windows 8 itself just for the purpose of recording the Windows 8 installation procedure.
Windows 8 Installation Guides

If you haven’t tried Windows 8 yet, you should consider doing that now because Windows 8 looks fresh, beautiful and definitely brings that “wow” effect. It’s a beta version but after using it for about a day, I found it stable though the new UI might involve a bit of learning curve.

The best part is that setting up Windows 8 is extremely easy and the installation procedure won’t take more than 15-20 minutes. Should you be interested, I have written several detailed guides that will walk you through the installation steps in either of the above scenarios – pick one that best fits your workflow and get going.

How To Install Windows 8
Windows 8 Installation Guides labnol

takecy 3/03/2012
Nessus 5.0 Vulnerability Scanner Releases
Nessus 5.0 Vulnerability Scanner
Tenable Network Security announced Nessus 5.0 vulnerability and configuration assessment solution for enterprises and security professionals. Nessus version 5.0 introduces key features and improvements, separated into the four major phases of the vulnerability scanning process: 

Installation and management (for enhanced usability) - Nessus 5.0 simplifies the installation and configuration for non-technical users. Configuration and management: Nessus v5.0 configuration and management is now done 100% through the GUI

Scan policy creation and design (for improved effectiveness) - Users now enjoy improved effectiveness when creating scan policies. Over two dozen new pre-built plugin filters make it easy for security and compliance professionals to simplify policy creation for laser-focused scans on the areas that matter most. Users can quickly select multiple filter criteria, such as, Vulnerability Publication Date, public vulnerability database ID (OSVDB, Bugtraq, CERT Advisory, and Secunia), Plugin type (local or remote), information assurance vulnerability alert (IAVA), and more, to quickly identify easily-exploitable vulnerabilities.Scan for all easily remotely-exploitable vulnerabilities for which there is an exploit published in your favorite exploit framework.

Scan execution (for improved efficiency) - Users can take advantage of real-time scan results, on-the-fly filtering and sorting, and streamlined results navigation. A new vulnerability summary and redesigned host summary make it easy to see risk level without even running a report. As the scan is being run, not only can you see the results as they are being gathered, but navigate and filter on them as well. This allows you to easily act upon the vulnerability data while the scan is happening.

Report customization and creation (for improved communication with all parts of the organization) - New reporting features allow for improved communication of vulnerability results with all parts of the organization:Results filtering and report creation: Results filtering and report creation is more flexible than ever before. Users can apply multiple result filtering criteria, and targeted reports can be generated against the filtered results. Reports can be generated in native Nessus formats, HTML, and now PDF formats, Multiple report templates can be combined into one report.


takecy 2/17/2012