Salon.com > Hacker

Hacker steals sensitive infrastructure data from U.S. military

Thu, 02 May 2013 20:34:00 +0000

The US military has revealed that a hacker infiltrated a government database for a period of several months, gaining access to detailed US Army Corps of Engineers information regarding possible vulnerabilities in US infrastructure.

According to a report published by nonprofit online newspaper the Washington Free Beacon, the hacker, possibly using stolen username and password credentials, accessed the National Inventory of Dams (NID) and siezed information not normally available to the public.

The NID database contains comprehensive information about 79,000 dams throughout the US, including the estimated number of deaths there would be if a given dam failed.

“The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is aware that access to the National Inventory of Dams (NID), to include sensitive fields of information not generally available to the public, was given to an unauthorized individual in January 2013 who was subsequently determined to not to have proper level of access for the information,” Army Corps of Engineers spokesperson Pete Pierce told the Washington Free Beacon.

George W. Bush’s art teacher says he’ll “go down in the history books as a great artist”

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 20:54:00 +0000

After a hacker shared emails that revealed former President George W. Bush likes to paint portraits of himself in the shower, Fox 5 in Atlanta has followed up with a very special report from a woman who spent one month teaching him how to paint. "He picked it up so quick, it was amazing, actually," says Bonnie Flood. The prolific dog painter ("He started out painting dogs, and I think he said he's painted over 50 dogs," said Flood) is "going to go down in the history books as a great artist."

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Jeremy Hammond speaks out from solitary confinement

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 17:45:00 +0000

On Thursday morning, the judge overseeing Jeremy Hammond's trial for his alleged involvement in the famed LulzSec Stratfor hack refused to step down from presiding over the case, despite a reported conflict of interest. Hammond's attorneys had filed a motion to have Judge Loretta Preska recuse herself from the case after it emerged that her husband had been a Stratfor client with data released by the hack.

The legal system is such that it was up to Preska herself to step down -- she opted against it, and Hammond will appear in court in April with the judge presiding. The same judge denied the activist bail (he has been held in a Manhattan federal prison for over a year, regularly placed in solitary confinement) and told the defendant that he could face life in jail for his alleged involvement in the hack.

On the same morning Judge Preska announced that she would not be stepping down from the case, Hammond released a statement of his own through his lawyers. The tract decries the criminal justice system's treatment of cyber activists, condemns government's persecution of dissent, and above all celebrates the work of the late Aaron Swartz.

Embattled Swartz prosecutor breaks silence

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 15:49:00 +0000

Federal prosecutors have been under scrutiny following the suicide of 26-year-old computer prodigy Aaron Swartz. After a few days of silence, the prosecutors are standing up for their work.

At the funeral, Swartz's father, Robert Swartz, said, “Aaron did not commit suicide — he was killed by the government. And [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] betrayed all its basic principles,” and the family has called the death "The product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach."

At the time of his death, Swartz was facing 13 felony charges stemming from his use of an MIT network to download thousands of articles from the nonprofit digital academic library JSTOR. The charges had increased from an original four charges: Wire fraud, computer fraud, theft of information from a computer and recklessly damaging a computer, according to Techdirt.