July Hacking News Roundup
Welcome to another installment in the latest in interesting hacking news. In this story, you’ll find out about a Google researcher who found a bug in Windows, Edward Snowden’s hacking skills, and hackers who have been spying on South Korea’s military for four years.
Microsoft Makes a Connection between Latest Hack and Google Researcher
While it’s usually good news when a company notifies users of recent hacking scams, thus averting those dreaded zero-day attacks, Microsoft’s recent announcement that the company’s Windows OS was hacked to attack computers indicates that the company might be upset with more than just the hackers at the center of the story. It might also have a bone to pick with the Google researcher who first discovered the exploit.
The Reuters report says Microsoft has been quiet on the details of the hack, only to say that “hackers have attacked some computers by exploiting a bug in Windows,” which Reuters said was first disclosed by Google security engineer Tavis Ormandy in May.
From Reuters:
Ormandy also drew attention because he lashed out in a blog posting at long-time Google rival Microsoft, saying that its security division was difficult to work with. He advised other researchers to use pseudonyms and anonymous email when communicating with the software maker.
Edward Snowden’s Hacking Skills
Edward Snowden, the man at the center of all the PRISM surveillance program madness, remains in purgatory as he waits to be granted asylum, which seems likely to be provided to him by Venezuela. Meanwhile, more details have been coming out about Snowden’s background and work experience, which has been described in the press with the somewhat ambiguous title “systems administrator.”
However, a recent New York Times article probed into Snowden’s background and discovered that the rogue has quite an impressive resume when it comes to hacking. Snowden gained certification as an “ethical hacker” under a program run by the EC-Council company. The Times reports that the program “has a code of honor that requires ethical hackers to keep private any confidential information that they obtain in checking systems for vulnerabilities.”
From the New York Times:
In an age when terabytes of data can be stashed inside palm-size devices, the new details about Mr. Snowden’s training and assignments underscore the challenges that the N.S.A. faces in recruiting a new generation of free-spirited computer experts with diverse political views.
Hackers Have Been Spying on South Korea’s Military for Four Years
Another report from Reuters says Intel Corp.’s McAfee discovered that “A mysterious group of computer hackers has spent four years spying on the South Korea military.” According to the report, while there has not yet been a “sponsor for the attacks,” a hacker organization known as the New Romanic Cyber Army Team launched the attacks.
McAfee said the group “infected PCs with sophisticated software that automatically sought out documents of interest by scanning computers for military keywords in English and Korean.” The software that the hackers were using was able to pinpoint “documents of interest” and then encrypt them so they could be sent back safely to the group.
Additionally, the hacker organization used botnets to steal data from the computers that were compromised, and in March, took “tens of thousands of PCs offline at South Korean companies by destroying data on their hard drives."
