Showing posts with label china hackers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label china hackers. Show all posts

Saturday, March 5, 2011

South Korean websites come under further attack.


SEOUL, South Korea – Unidentified attackers targeted more than two dozen South Korean government and private websites Saturday, a day after two waves of similar attacks, but officials reported no serious damage.
A total of 29 websites were hit Saturday in so-called "denial of service" attacks, in which large numbers of "zombie" computers try to connect to a site at the same time in an attempt to overwhelm the server, the Korea Communications Commission said.
Commission official Lee Sang-kug said the attacks were "so weak that no actual damage was detected so far." Lee said the commission would keep a close watch on the situation in coming days, but that the fallout was likely to remain limited because the government and computer security companies were well prepared.
Saturday's attacks on sites including South Korea's presidential office, the Foreign Ministry, the Defense Ministry, some financial institutions and U.S. Forces Korea followed two rounds Friday in which damage was also limited.
Lee said that 40 websites were originally targeted Friday, though only 29 came under actual attack. A total of 29 were targeted Saturday, he said.
The National Police Agency said the attacks originated from 30 servers in 18 foreign countries or territories including the United States, Israel, Russia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Japan, India, Brazil and Iran.
"We may find more servers behind this attack as it is only the beginning of the investigation," said Jung Suk-hwa, head of the agency's Cyber Terror Response Center. "Generally, there is someone else who controls all of these servers and we are working to figure out who it is."
In 2009, some government websites in South Korea and the U.S. were paralyzed by a similar type of attack that South Korean officials believed was conducted by North Korea. But U.S. officials have largely ruled out North Korea as the origin, according to cybersecurity experts.
South Korean media have previously reported that North Korea runs an Internet warfare unit aimed at hacking into U.S. and South Korean military networks to gather information and disrupt service.
Park Kun-woo, a spokesman for South Korean computer security company AhnLab, said Friday that China is also pointed to as a source of cyberattacks because a large amount of malware, or malicious software, originates from there.
Full Article 

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Morgan Stanley hit by China-based hackers.


NEW YORK (Reuters) – Morgan Stanley experienced a "very sensitive" break-in to its network by the same China-based hackers who attacked Google Inc's computers more than a year ago, Bloomberg reported, citing leaked emails from an Internet security company.
The emails from the Sacramento, California-based computer security firm HBGary Inc said that Morgan Stanley -- the first financial institution identified in the series of attacks -- considered details of the intrusion a closely guarded secret, the report said.
Bloomberg quoted Phil Wallisch, a senior security engineer at HBGary, as saying that he read an internal Morgan Stanley report detailing the so-called Aurora attacks.
The HBGary emails don't indicate what information may have been stolen from Morgan Stanley's databanks or which of the world's largest merger adviser's multinational operations were targeted, according to the report.
Representatives for HBGary were not immediately available for comment.
A Morgan Stanley spokeswoman declined to comment on whether the bank had been targeted in the Aurora attacks.
"Morgan Stanley invests significantly in IT security and manages a robust program to deal with malware and attempted computer compromises," spokeswoman Sandra Hernandez said in a statement emailed to Reuters.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu repeated that China opposed any kind of hacking.
"We often hear this kind of story. I don't know if related parties have reported this to the relevant authorities asking China to cooperate," Jiang told a regular news briefing.
"We ... will use the law to go after any kind of hacking or crime on the Internet," she added.

Read Full :- China Hackers.

Saturday, February 19, 2011

What Is Ethical Hacking ?


Ethical hacking, often performed by white hats or skilled computer experts, is the use of programming skills to determine vulnerabilities in computer systems. While the non-ethical hacker or black hat exploits these vulnerabilities for mischief, personal gain or other reasons, the ethical hacker evaluates them, points them out, and may suggest changes to systems that make them less likely to be penetrated by black hats. White hats can work in a variety of ways. Many companies utilize ethical hacking services from consultants or full-time employees to keep their systems and information as secure as possible.
The work of ethical hacking is still considered hacking because it uses knowledge of computer systems in an attempt to in some way penetrate them or crash them. This work is ethical because it is performed to increase the safety of the computer systems. It’s reasoned that if a white hat can somehow break the security protocols of a system, so can a black hat. Thus, the goal of ethical hacking is to determine how to break in or create mischief with the present programs running, but only at the request of the company that owns the system and specifically to prevent others from attacking it.
People enter the field of ethical hacking in a variety of ways. Many people are very computer savvy and many, but not all, have an educational background in computer science. In some instances, the white hat has gained his or her experience by first being a black hat.
If black hat hacking was at a sufficiently criminal level, the black hat turned white hat may have served jail time before resuming a career in a more productive and positive way as an ethical hacker. The computer world is peopled with former black hats, who now hold ethical hacking jobs. Conversely, some white hats, such as Steve Wozniak, never committed any illegal acts, but simply possess the know-how and skills to analyze problems with any computer system.
With increasing use of the Internet and concerns about its security, especially when it comes to things like consumer information or private medical details, there is considerable need for computer experts to work in ethical hacking. Even sites owned by organizations like the US government have been hacked in the past, and concern about information theft remains incredibly high. Designing impenetrable systems or identifying the current weaknesses of a system are vital parts of keeping the Internet safe and information private, and even with the present legion of ethical hackers that perform this work, there is still more work to do. 
Those with interest in the field of ethical hacking often acquire a lot of their skills on their own, and many have particular talent with and affinity for computers. Some knowledge can also be acquired through formal education in computer programming. This work requires creativity, and the ethical hacker must be able to think outside of the box, coming up with as many possible ways as he or she can derive, a system might be encroached upon by black hats.