By Kim Zetter
Wired.com
In an extraordinary intervention, the Justice Department has sought and won permission from a federal judge to seize control of a massive criminal botnet comprised of millions of private computers, and deliver a command to those computers to disable the malicious software.
The request, filed Tuesday under seal in the U.S. District Court in Connecticut, sought a temporary restraining order to allow the non-profit Internet Systems Consortium to swap out command-and-control servers that were communicating with machines infected with Coreflood — malicious software used by computer criminals to loot victims’ bank accounts.
According to the filing, ISC, under law enforcement supervision, planned to replace the servers with servers that it controlled, then collect the IP addresses of all infected machines communicating with the criminal servers, and send a remote “stop” command to infected machines to disable the Coreflood malware operating on them.
A Justice Department spokeswoman confirmed that the takeover occurred Tuesday evening, and the shutdown command was sent to infected computers based in the U.S.
“Under the authority granted by the court in the TRO, we have responded to requests from infected computers in the United States with a command that temporarily stops the malware from running on the infected computers,” wrote spokeswoman Laura Sweeney in an e-mail.
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Posted on April 14th 2011 in
Hacks,
Security,
Technology
By Charlie Sorrel
http://www.wired.com
Programmer James Laird wanted to help his girlfriend stream her iTunes music in her new house, so he hacked away at Apple’s private key for streaming music, reverse-engineered the script, and made it available to the public.
Laird calls his open source Perl script Shairport, which lets hardware and software receive AirTunes music from iTunes.
Apple uses a public-key encryption scheme for AirTunes streaming. This lets anyone encrypt and stream audio to the AirPort Express (or other compatible device), but iTunes would only stream to Apple devices. Now, with Shairport, iTunes can be tricked into streaming audio to anything at all.
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Posted on April 12th 2011 in
Audio,
Hacks,
Technology
Judge Lets Sony Unmask Visitors to PS3-Jailbreaking Site
By David Kravets
A federal magistrate is granting Sony the right to acquire the internet IP addresses of anybody who has visited PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz’s website from January of 2009 to the present.
Thursday’s decision by Magistrate Joseph Spero to allow Sony to subpoena Hotz’s web provider (.pdf) raises a host of web-privacy concerns.
Respected for his iPhone hacks and now the PlayStation 3 jailbreak, Hotz is accused of breaching the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other laws after he published an encryption key and software tools on his website that allow Playstation owners to gain complete control of their consoles from the firmware on up.
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Posted on March 25th 2011 in
Hacks,
Technology
By Brian X. Chen
George Hotz, famously known as the first hacker to unlock the iPhone, says he’s done it again. The whiz kid on Thursday evening said he had cooked up a new hack for all iPhone OS devices, and he’s betting it will work on the iPad, too.
When the hack is released (Hotz won’t disclose a release date), it should be as simple to use as Blackra1n, Hotz’s one-click solution to jailbreak current iPhones, he said.
“It is completely untethered, works on all current tethered models (ipt2, 3gs, ipt3), and will probably work on iPad too,” Hotz said in his blog post.
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Posted on March 25th 2011 in
Cell Phones,
Hacks,
Technology
