"I am sorry Papa. I am committing suicide," said a text message from Rekha Singh, second year polytechnic student in electronics stream, to her father Ranjeet, a WCL manager at Kamptee. The 22-year-old Rekha had been afraid to face her father since she had lied to him about her repeated failures. She jumped to her death from the third-floor balcony of her hostel within a minute of sending the SMS.
26-year-old Slovenian hacker known as Iserdo stands thought to have been behind the Mariposa botnet is on trial in Slovenia, charged with having masterminded an international cybercrime gang.
At its height, the Mariposa botnet infected up to 12.7 million PCs, with more than half of the Fortune 1,000 companies believed to have been compromised, including 40 major banks. Once a computer had been compromised and brought into the botnet, operators could steal information from innocent users - including credit card details and banking passwords.
On Friday, Reuters blog platform was hacked with false posts and on Saturday, the @ReutersTech account on Twitter was taken over and renamed @TechMe. False tweets were sent before it was taken down.
The first attack came Friday after Syrian hackers loyal to President Bashar al-Assad allegedly gained access to Reuters’ blogging platform, which they used to post a fake interview with rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) leader Riad al-Assad. The interview essentially said the general was withdrawing troops after a battle.
Security researcher Jonathan Brossard created a proof-of-concept hardware backdoor called Rakshasa that replaces a computer's BIOS (Basic Input Output System) and can compromise the operating system at boot time without leaving traces on the hard drive.
In short, firmware is software that is stored in non-volatile memory on a computer chip, and is used to initialise a piece of hardware’s functionality. In a PC, the BIOS is the most common example of firmware but in the case of wireless routers, a whole Linux operating system is stored in firmware.
An inactive website of the Southern Railways www.southernrailway.gov.in has been defaced apparently by Pakistani hackers.
The hacker group that calls itself ‘Pak Cyber Pyrates’ replaced the home page of the website with a page with content that denounces India’s role in Kashmir.
The official Southern Railways website moved to a new domain www.sr.indianrailways.gov.in back in 2010.