Michael S. Rosenwald reports: Alexandra Elbakyan is a highbrow pirate in hiding. The 27-year-old graduate student from Kazakhstan is operating a searchable online database of nearly 50 million stolen scholarly journal articles, shattering the $10 billion-per-year paywall of academic publishers. Elbakyan has kept herself beyond the reach of a federal judge who late last year…
Category: Hack
Turkish Citizenship Database Leak (Update 2)
Who would have imagined that backwards ideologies, cronyism and rising religious extremism in Turkey would lead to a crumbling and vulnerable technical infrastructure? Seen online after a subsequently-deleted tweet called attention to it: This paste with a link to a 6.6 GB file, purportedly containing clear-text information on 49,611,709 Turkish citizens, including the following details: National Identifier (TC Kimlik…
How to Hack an Election
Jordan Robertson, Michael Riley, and Andrew Willis report: It was just before midnight when Enrique Peña Nieto declared victory as the newly elected president of Mexico. Peña Nieto was a lawyer and a millionaire, from a family of mayors and governors. His wife was a telenovela star. He beamed as he was showered with red,…
Mossack Fonseca warns customers of unauthorized ‘Panamaleaks’ data breach
Matthew Vella reports: Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca has informed customers of the impending media storm yet to be unleashed, as a leak of company information is scheduled to hit the headlines. Mossack Fonseca – notorious for its indiscriminate assistance to the global rich and nefarious dictators – said its data had been leaked through…
Hacker Breaches Porn Network, Advertises User Data on Dark Web
Joseph Cox reports: A hacker has gained access to administrative functions on the porn website Team Skeet and is advertising a database supposedly containing email addresses, plain text passwords, names, and physical and IP addresses for over 237,000 users of the site, as well as the broader porn network, Paper Street Media (PSM). “I want…
Romanian National “Guccifer” Extradited to Face Hacking Charges
Marcel Lehel Lazăr, 44, of Arad, Romania, allegedly the hacker “Guccifer,” made his initial appearance today in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. Lazăr had been temporarily surrendered from Romania to face U.S. charges relating to unauthorized access of protected computers, announced Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney Dana…