Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Hackers Breach Sites of Foreign Policy and Human Rights Groups

Perlroth, Nicole. "Hackers Breach Sites of Foreign Policy and Human Rights Groups." The New York Times, May 15, 2012.

From the article: "In recent weeks, hackers have breached Web sites belonging to several foreign policy and human rights groups, including Amnesty International and the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, a nonprofit organization based in Israel that researches terrorism issues. Hackers infiltrated the sites using two well-known security vulnerabilities, one in Adobe Flash and another in Java software, according to a blog post by security researchers at the Shadowserver Foundation, a nonprofit group that tracks cyber threats….In each case, infected sites can drop malware onto visitors’ computers, which opens a back door between the attackers’ command center and the victims’ computers. Once computers are infected, the attackers can move from infected computers into other computers in the victims’ networks, or organizations." Read more