Researcher Demonstrates ATM ‘Jackpotting’ at Black Hat Conference

LAS VEGAS — In a city filled with slot machines spilling jackpots, it was a “jackpotted” ATM that got the most attention Wednesday at the Black Hat security conference, when researcher Barnaby Jack demonstrated two suave hacks against automated teller machines that made them spew out dozens of crisp bills.
The audience greeted the demonstration with [...]

Court Says Privacy Advocate May Publish Social Security Numbers

A federal appeals court has ordered Virginia’s attorney general to back away from threats of suing a privacy advocate who publishes Social Security numbers of elected officials on the internet.
The decision by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals means Betty Ostergren avoids being sued by the state’s top law enforcement official for breaching a [...]

Exclusive Sneak Peek: DefCon Ninja Party Badge

LAS VEGAS — A hacker group known as the Ninjas has created what may be the best DefCon badge ever. The badge allows wireless ninja battle between badge holders. Unlike the official badge, attendees can’t buy this one: it’s free.
DefCon, the world’s largest hacker convention, is more than just a group of hackers getting together [...]

Ukrainian Carding King ‘Maksik’ Was Lured to Arrest

A Ukrainian carder who earned more than $11 million selling credit and debit card data stolen from top U.S. retailers was lured to a meeting in Turkey in 2007 where he was arrested by local authorities, according to a new report released Wednesday.
Maksym Yastremskiy, alleged to be the underground carding kingpin known as “Maksik,” was [...]

Second Student Sues School District Over Webcam Spying

A webcam scandal at a suburban Philadelphia school district expanded Tuesday to include a second student alleging his school-issued laptop secretly snapped images of him.
The brouhaha commenced in February, when a student of Lower Merion School District was called into an administrator’s office. Sophomore Blake Robbins was shown a picture of himself that officials suggested [...]

Privacy Lawsuit Targets Net Giants Over ‘Zombie’ Cookies

A wide swath of the net’s top websites, including MTV, ESPN, MySpace, Hulu, ABC, NBC and Scribd, were sued in federal court Friday on the grounds they violated federal computer intrusion law by secretly using storage in Adobe’s Flash player to re-create cookies deleted by users.
At issue is technology from Quantcast, also targeted in the [...]

Pentagon Says Bradley Manning a Possible Suspect in Afghan Leak

The Pentagon regards Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning as a possible suspect in leaking a classified six-year history of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan that Wikileaks published over the weekend, a spokesman said Monday.
“He is certainly one person that we would be looking at in terms of this leak,” said Col. Dave Lapan. “He’s not [...]

U.S. Declares iPhone Jailbreaking Legal, Over Apple’s Objections

Federal regulators lifted a cloud of uncertainty when they announced it was lawful to hack or “jailbreak” an iPhone, declaring Monday there was “no basis for copyright law to assist Apple in protecting its restrictive business model.”
Jailbreaking is hacking the phone’s OS to allow consumers to run any app on the phone they choose, including [...]

Wikileaks Releases Stunning Afghan War Logs — Is Iraq Next?

The secret-spilling site Wikileaks on Sunday released a breathtaking classified compendium of 77,000 events covering six years of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. But they could have much more.
The New York Times, the U.K.-based Guardian, and the German magazine Der Spiegel were given embargoed copies of the Secret-level database about a month ago, and all [...]

Handgun-Wielding Darth Vader Robs Bank

He didn’t speak with the voice of James Earl Jones or wield a light saber. But a 6-foot-tall man dressed as Darth Vader wasn’t playing games when he flashed a handgun and demanded that a New York bank teller fork over the loot.
The unidentified Darth Vader got away Thursday from a Chase Bank branch in [...]