Extra Reporters

Since its launch in 2004, Facebook has drawn more than seven hundred and fifty million active users (and their fair share of bumps and bruises over its privacy policies). Facebook provides unsupecting users many opportunities to reveal their private details unintentionally, making this particular networking site a perfect target for hackers. Adopting intense hacking prevention techniques can help to keep your information protected and your Facebook profile completely under their radar. For a hacker who is familiar with Facebook and all of its aspects, accessing personal information takes just a few mouse clicks. Based on the information visible on peoples’ profiles — for instance your friends, family and colleagues, and their friends and coworkers — someone with enough knowledge can easily find your physical address, email address, family names, cv and even personal contact number(s). If hackers obtain this details, these folks may eventually acquire your identity. The fol...

A Russian cyber attack around July 25 shut down the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff’s unclassified email system for 11 days and affected around 4,000 military and civilian personnel who work for the Joint Chiefs. No classified information was taken or put at risk. Only unclassified email accounts were infiltrated. Lieutenant Colonel Valerie Henderson, Pentagon spokeswoman, told the Daily Mail Online , “ Joint Staff unclassified networks for all users are currently down . We continue to identify and mitigate cyber security risks across our networks. With those goals in mind, we have taken the Joint Staff network down and continue to investigate. Our top priority is to restore services as quickly as possible. As a matter of policy and for operational security reasons, we do not comment on the details of cyber incidents or attacks against our networks.” At a news briefing, Navy Capt. Jeff Davis told reporters that the attack did not threaten military operations since it ...

The governor of Bayelsa state, Seriake Dickson, is not the only politician hacking phones and intercepting communication of political peers and rivals in Nigeria. Almost all recent governors of the South South region of Nigeria intercepted calls and hacked phones and computers, an illegal practice that gave them backdoor access to many people’s private lives, an ongoing PREMIUM TIMES investigation has revealed. Our findings show that Rotimi Amaechi, former Rivers state governor; Godswill Akpabio, former Akwa Ibom state governor; and Emmanuel Uduaghan, former Delta state governor illegally acquired technologies that allowed them conduct mass surveillance and hack people’s gadgets, mainly to eavesdrop on their conversations, know who they talked with and what their plans were. These three formers governors are the latest privacy violators and spymasters weeks after Mr. Dickson was exposed for similar illegal practice. They all exited office as governors in May, follow...

The technology expert website,  Fossbytes.com , has compiled a list of the top 10 best performing, free antivirus programs for the year 2015. Although there are good paid antivirus programs, such as Norton or McAfee which protect and arm your computer system from harm, the exorbitant price charged by these companies in exchange makes it difficult for some people to have access. You need not worry, however, because these free antivirus programs will give you almost the same protection as the paid ones. According to F ossBytes , the number one best free antivirus program of the year is  Avast Free Antivirus . Avast runs on Windows and almost all Mac OSX versions. It is not difficult to install, it has a heuristics search and ‘on-access’ protection pack. It also has features such as real-time protection of files, email, P2P transfers, web surfing, instant messages and even suspicious behavior are a notch above your average free antivi...

A group of Moroccan hackers, The Exploit3rs , hacked and defaced the official Moroccan sites of Google, Microsoft and Kaspersky as well as that of Morocco Trade and Development Services ( domain.ma ) to show that major websites, which provide data protection of their users, are vulnerable and thus hackable. After hacking the sites, the hackers, who have earlier attacked several international sites owned by MacDonald’s, Orange, Twitter , Dell, Pepsi , HP, and Samsung in 2013, left this message: “You think that you control the domains but this is not the case! Everyone knows that it is false. We control the domains including NIC in Morocco! We Want To Inform You That We Can Own Any .Ma Website Now.” Using DNS hijacking, the group was able to hack into the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Morocco where domain.ma, google.co.ma, google.ma, microsoft.ma and Kaspersky.ma domains are hosted. The Google.ma and Microsoft.ma both are parked domains while the G...

A hacker from Yemen, going by the alias, “./lov3r,” has hacked into the one of the sub-domains belonging to US President, Barack Obama. The Yemeni hacker defaced the website, my.barackobama.com (which is a sub-domain of www.barackobama.com ), leaving a special message for President Obama… including the use of the “N” word. Seems he is disrespecting President Obama and at the same time also asking for him to leave Yemen alone. This same network was used by 35,000 groups during the election campaign for the president and this sub-domain is not a new target for hackers… a Yemeni hacker group, the Syrian Electronic Army, also hacked this website last year. This Yemeni hacker appears to be quite skilled in the field, as he is the same hacker who was able to hack into major websites like Coca-Cola, AVG Security, Avast Security and many others. For the past couple of years now, people have chosen hacking as a way to bring attention to, and raise a voice against, inju...

Seth Nolan-Mcdonagh, the British teenage cyber geek known in the cyber world as Narko, was just 13 when he joined a network of online hackers who later brought websites of global institutions including the BBC, to their knees using distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. In March 2013, hackers targeted Spamhaus, a firm that provides details of spammers to email and network providers. The attack on this anti-junk mail slowed the Internet around the world. Spamhaus called on Cloudflare, a service that blocks online assaults, for support, which led to the largest known DDoS attack by hackers at the time. At its peak, the attack was guiding 300 GB of traffic every second to Spamhaus computers. After his arrest in April 2013, more than £70,000 were discovered in Mcdonagh’s bank account. Cops found the source code used in the attacks on devices in his London home. He also had in his possession 1,000 credit card numbers. Nolan-Mcdonagh pleaded guilty to two counts of u...