Word: hacker
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...your credit-card information was stolen recently, there's a decent chance it fell into the hands of Albert Gonzalez. The infamous computer hacker was indicted along with two unnamed co-conspirators in a New Jersey court on Aug. 17 for the alleged theft of some 130 million card numbers. The crime is believed to be the largest retail-store theft in U.S. history. Although little is known about Gonzalez's personal life, he has a long history of hacking and has been known to operate on both sides of the law. (Read "A Brief History of Cybercrime...
...older individuals or small groups toward the exchange, skewing the risk pool there and driving up premiums. "You just have to cherry-pick a little bit to be really profitable," says Pollitz. Both the House and Senate plans call for regulations and rules to prohibit this. But, as Jacob Hacker, a health-policy expert at Yale University, puts it, "The real concern comes down to having adequate resources for enforcement. It's one thing to have rules and another thing to make sure insurance companies are abiding by those rules." The House plan calls for the creation...
...Hackers slowed Twitter to a standstill early on Aug. 6, frustrating millions of users. For the culprits, all it took to snarl the popular social-networking site was one of the oldest tools in the Internet hacker handbook: the distributed denial-of-service attack (commonly shortened to DDoS), a method that has been used to crash some of the Web's largest sites, including Yahoo...
DDoS attacks are surprisingly low tech. Using a network of computers (dubbed zombies) controlled by a single master machine, the hacker tries to overwhelm a website's servers. It's a brute-force approach - the network of hacker-controlled computers floods the server with requests for data until the server overloads and comes crashing down. Graham Cluley, a computer security expert, likened the attack to "15 fat men trying to get through a revolving door at the same time." The attacks do no lasting damage - user data aren't compromised, and the site isn't down for long. Once...
USAGE: "In the neverending cat-and-mouse game with Apple, iPhone hackers have been toiling away for weeks trying to jailbreak the iPhone 3GS, which went on sale in mid-June. On [July 3], a hacker who calls himself 'geohot' released the first jailbreaking software for the device." --Wall Street Journal, July...