Welcome to 2011, Year of the Hacker
In the 1990s hackers ran rampant, breaking into and compromising some of the most sensitive business and government systems worldwide. Their incredible success led to major industry adjustments. Corporate and government IT departments adjusted their policies and cracked down on security. New security-centered firms were born.
But this year there has been an explosion of high-profile system intrusions the likes of which have not been seen in a decade. And for all those fancy protections, one thing is clear -- much of the "security" of modern systems appears to be an illusion.
And the web has yet again became a digital Wild West -- a place where the lines between good and evil blur; a place where the strong victimize the weak; and a place where the line between mercy and destruction rests on the personal prejudices of bands of digital bandits.
I. 2011: Year of the Hacker
On Monday,
LulzSec ("Lulz Security") published a data dump of a thorough intrusion of the front end of the U.S. Senate's servers. But this is far from the first significant intrusion this year.
Let's pause to briefly recap a few of the most important hacks:
Jan. 4:
Anonymous uses distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks to
take down Tunisian government websites.
Jan. 10:
Anonymous hacks Irish centre-right party Fine Gael, defacing its website and accusing it of censorship. Over 2,000 party-member accounts are compromised.
Jan. 18: Members of griefer group
Goatse Security are charged by the
U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation for their role in
exposing iPad user information.
Jan. 28: British police
arrest five alleged members of
Anonymous.
Jan. 28:
CNET reports that
Goatse Security's homepage is defaced by an ex-member. We reveal that this
appears to be a publicity stunt, though for the record a spokesman for the group firmly denies this.
Feb. 3:
Anonymous members uses DDoS to take down the
websites of the Egyptian government during the revolution against dictator Hosni Mubarak.
Feb. 5-6: HBGary, a security contractor is hacked by
Anonymous via SQL injection, social engineering, and other tactics.
68,000 emails are dumped, including ones that implicate that the Bank of America hired HBGary to try to attack
Wikileaks.
Feb. 10: Chinese hackers steal information from seven oil companies in
an operation dubbed "Night Dragon".
Feb. 10: White paper states that
iPhone passwords can be exposed via a jailbreak-driven attack.
Feb. 17: China implicated in "unprecedented"
attack on Canadian government servers.....................................................
Read other high rofile hacking done so far at
DailyTech - Welcome to 2011, Year of the Hacker.