Weekly task 2 - Hackers and viruses

Virus cases

Facebook e-mail as camouflage for Virus attack – 21.03.2010

In March 2010 a lot of Facebook users had problems with a phishing virus. The users got a e-mail with the information that the password have to be renewed. The attachment of the mail includes dangerous software. This software installed different programs from the internet on the computer and with this program the hacker is able to find out passwords and usernames.
Source: http://news.preisgenau.de/phishing-virus-fordert-user-auf-ihr-facebook-password-zuruckzusetzen-6176.html

MMS – Bomber in China – 05.04.2010
A virus in China infected millions of cell phones. The virus is camouflaged as a application and sends per multimedia message a URL with dangerously codes. The owner of the cell phone have to pay for this MMS without any knowledge about it.
Source: http://business.chip.de/news/MMS-Bomber-Virus-auf-Millionen-von-Handys_42290969.html

Famous Hackers and cases caused by hackers

Kevin Mitnick

Kevin Mitnick is most likely the most famous hacker of his time (he is born in 1963). He has been in jail for several times because of his crimes done by hacking to different systems (for example, Advanced Research Projects Agency Network of The USA from witch the Internet as we know it now was developed). Mr. Mitnick hacked also to several companies' computer systems (ie. Nokia, Fujitsu, Motorola).

Nowadays Kevin Mitnick can be discribed as "white-hat hacker" since he is running his own computer security consultancy. He has also wrote two books and several movies are made about him.

Sources: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/6670127/Top-10-most-famous-hackers.html
http://www.takedown.com/bio/mitnick.html

Hacker Revenge in China -08.04.2010
The Chinese politician Yan Qi supports an embargo of private Internet cafés. In her opinion are Internet cafés the main reason for social problems like truancy and addiction to computer games.

The User community of such internet cafes reacted with a Hacker attack. Goal of the attack was the website of the restaurant, which owner is Yin. The Hackers deleted all links and wrote disdainfully messages on the site.
Sources: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/computer/837/505043/text/
http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/0,1518,681688,00.html

US- Hacker swindled with stolen Credit card data’s - 27.03.2010
The Hacker Albert Gonzales stole as much as $ 200 million by penetrating the server of a credit-card processing company and intercepting wireless signals from major retail outlets. He used real accounts to create bogus credit cards..
Source: http://www.webbassena.com/2010/03/allgemein/us-computer-hacker-albert-gonzalez-muss-

Jonna's experiences and thoughts of viruses
Luckily I have never been able to have or install a virus into any of our computers because of the good firewalls and anti-virus programs that have been running in our computers. Those programs are updated on regularly basis and they will give a notice when they need to be updated or when there is a new better version available.The good thing in those programs is that you can easily and freely download those from the internet and install them without being a computer wizard.

Not long ago I was surfing on my favorite baking sites and got virus warning after I opened one link on the site. I was actually a bit scared not because of the virus alarm notice but the alarm sound the computer started to keep! The virus itself was easy to remove, just by choosing delete from the multiple options. The virus was some kind of worm; I did not pay a lot of attention to that.

The other members of our group have got similar experiences and it has been nice to notice that none of us have been able to get a virus neither into the computer nor to the memory stick.