Security News
Texas communities struggled for days with disruptions to core government services as workers in small cities and towns endured a cascade of frustrations brought on by the sophisticated cyberattack, according to thousands of pages of documents reviewed by The Associated Press and interviews with people involved in the response. In Borger, a city of fewer than 13,000, early indications were worrisome as the city raced to shut down its computers.
In contrast, the Twitter hack we're referring to ultimately led to the takeover of just 45 accounts. The suspects were alleged to have previous form in hacking and trading in so-called OG accounts, where OG is short for original gangster.
A British man has been charged in the United States in connection with a Twitter hack last summer that compromised the accounts of prominent politicians, celebrities and technology moguls, the Justice Department said Wednesday. Joseph O'Connor, 22, was arrested in the coastal resort town of Estepona, Spain, on an arrest warrant accusing him of involvement in a July 2020 hack of more than 130 accounts, and of hacks that prosecutors said took over TikTok and Snapchat accounts, including "One of the most viewed and followed" TikTok stars.
A U.K. citizen has been arrested in the Spanish town of Estepona over his alleged involvement in the July 2020 hack of Twitter, resulting in the compromise of 130 high-profile accounts. Joseph O'Connor, 22, has been charged with intentionally accessing a computer without authorization and obtaining information from a protected computer, as well as for making extortive communications.
A fourth suspect has been arrested today for his role in the Twitter hack last year that gave attackers access to the company's internal network exposing high-profile accounts to hijacking. The United States Department of Justice announced that Joseph O'Connor, a 22-year old UK national, was detained in Spain on several charges related to the Twitter hack in July 2020.
The Wi-Fi network name bug that was found to completely disable an iPhone's networking functionality had remote code execution capabilities and was silently fixed by Apple earlier this year, according to new research. The denial-of-service vulnerability, which came to light last month, stemmed from the way iOS handled string formats associated with the SSID input, triggering a crash on any up-to-date iPhone that connected to wireless access points with percent symbols in their names such as "%p%s%s%s%s%n.
iPhones have been compromised by the NSO Group's Pegasus spyware. The findings indicated that the Pegasus spyware program sold by surveillance company NSO Group was able to infect iPhone 11 and iPhone 12 models through zero-click attacks in the iOS iMessage app.
China on Tuesday said the US had "Fabricated" allegations it carried out a massive Microsoft hack, countering that Washington was the "World champion" of cyber attacks while raging at American allies for signing up to a rare joint statement of condemnation. The United States on Monday accused Beijing of carrying out the March cyber attack on Microsoft Exchange, a top email server for corporations around the world, and charged four Chinese nationals over the "Malicious" hack.
Human rights and press freedom activists are up in arms about a new report on NSO Group, the notorious Israeli hacker-for-hire company. The report, by a global media consortium, expands public knowledge of the target list used in NSO's military-grade spyware.
The US has also blamed hackers working with China for ransomware attacks, extortion, crypto-jacking and other cybercrimes. The United States and several allies have officially pointed the finger at China for the recent hack of Microsoft Exchange server as well as an ongoing series of cyberattacks carried out by contract hackers for personal profit.