hacking - page 3

If you make something private, obviously you want it to stay that way. But with hackers trying to get at your data, you need to be prepared. Following the recent iCloud hacking that leaked tons of private celebrity photos, there’s a renewed focus on security.

In today’s video, we show you how to enable two-step verification on all your Apple devices so you’ll have a better chance of keeping everything that’s near and dear to you private and secure.

Subscribe to Cult of Mac TV on YouTube to catch all our latest videos.

Last month, a number of Apple users in Australia woke up to find that their iOS devices had been locked by an “Oleg Pliss,” and that they needed to pay a ransom if they wanted to continue using them. While a few people thought iCloud could have been hacked, Apple denied those rumors.

Now it seems that the hackers involved with the ransom demands have been detailed by authorities in Russia, according to a new report from the Sydney Morning Herald.

Aged 17 and 23, the alleged hackers are both residents of the Southern Administrative District of Moscow, and one has been previously tried for a similar case.

Apple says that iCloud was not hacked, following on from the news that a number of iOS and Mac users in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the U.S. report have had their devices remotely locked in exchange for ransom.

It’s been speculated that the hacking in question was done using login credentials gained from users as a result of recent data breaches and then used as Apple ID logins to lock users out via iCloud. While this may be the case, Apple says that it is not the result of the iCloud being compromised in any way.

Ubisoft’s upcoming Watch Dogs console game is hoping to upend the traditional boundaries between single- and multi-player gaming, allowing you to hack into other players’ games on the fly, earning experience and renown points which you can then use to level up your own character’s skill levels.

The game was a huge surprise at last year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), and has since been getting a ton of attention from gamers and the press as the May 27 release date looms.

Even better, you’ll be able to interact with the very same game and players via a free mobile app, letting you increase the heat on rogue players, as you can see in this fairly long and detailed play through video below. Sure, the video is ridiculously longer than most gamer’s attention spans, but it’s well worth a look.

Paper is quickly becoming a thing of the past, so we’re offering you a three-year digital subscription to Hacker Monthly that you can enjoy on any device you want (PDF, MOBI, EPUB format), DRM-free for the price of just one year. Plus, you get access to all current and past issues immediately after your purchase.

And you’ll get all this for only $29.

T-Mobile finally has the iPhone 5. It’s great, and cheap, but unfortunately its data speeds are slower than an iPhone 5 on AT&T. Not satisfied with their slower iPhone 5s, Joseph Brown and Sky Zangas did some digging around in carrier update files and figured out a way to boost data speeds on the T-Mobile iPhone 5.

To get faster data speeds on T-Mobile’s network with the iPhone 5 all you have to do is install a custom carrier update. That sounds like a tough task, but it’s actually pretty easy, and thanks to the guys at TmoNews, here’s a quick guide on how to do it:

Back in 2010, a team of hackers who went under the group handle Goatse Security exploited a hole in AT&T’s website to steal over a hundred thousand iPad subscribers’ email addresses.

The first of the pair, Daniel Spitlier, plead guilty to the attack back in 2011, bringing him a 12-18 month maximum sentence.

His partner, though, hasn’t gotten off nearly as easily: Andrew ‘weev’ Auernheimer has just been sentenced to forty-one months.

Last week we asked you guys to show us just how amazing you can make your iPhone look with tweaks and hacks for the homescreen and lockscreen, and boy were we impressed. We received over 100 entries in the jailbreaking contest and pretty much all of them were spectacular.

To celebrate the launch of our new Flickr and Instagram groups, we’re giving the 10 best jailbreak screens a free copy of Kuvva Wallpapers. After some serious deliberation, we think we’ve got some drool-worthy winners.

Here are the 10 most amazing jailbreak screens:

It’s only been a few weeks since the first lockscreen hack was discovered on iOS 6.1, but some researchers have already discovered a new way to bypass the iPhone’s lockscreen without entering the security PIN.

The bug was found in iOS 6.1 by Benjamin Kunx Mejri, and it follows some of the steps as the last exploit but has some variation in the steps, and it allows an attacker to access all your data by plugging your device into a computer’s USB port.

Earlier today it was reported that Apple’s computers had been compromised by a zero-day exploit in Java. Apple quickly released an update to patch the flaw for all Macs, but not before some of its own employees had been hacked.

The hack in question affected more than just Apple; Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Twitter were also compromised. How exactly were hackers able to gain access to some of the biggest tech companies’ computers? The source is a single web forum for iPhone development.

Terminal app can be daunting at first, but it’s really the best way to hack into your Mac’s configurations and preferences to customize things to work for you rather than against you. With the right Terminal commands, you can tweak the Finder, mess with the user interface, build a more private and secure Mac, and even enable features that aren’t officially supported on older Macs.

Here are a few of the better ones.

Ah, the venerable old Macintosh Portable. First introduced in 1989, the $6,500 wasn’t just a milestone in that it was the first battery-powered portable Mac, but it was also the first laptop ever used to send an email in space.

I’ve always been fond of the cute, suitcase-y design of the Portable Macintosh, so I’m delighted to see that some industrious hacker has given it a new life by gutting it and transplanting the innards of a Toshiba NB100 netbook inside. Some truly advanced soldering later, and you have, for all appearances, a pristine Macintosh Portable that can also run OS X Mountain Lion.

Check out this full video tour…

Back in 2007, Steve Jobs used a famous quote from ice hockey player Wayne Gretzky to summarize Apple’s commitment to innovation: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” That’s long been true for Apple and products like the iPhone and iPad. But for more than four years, jailbeaking has pushed the boundaries of iOS even farther.

If Apple skates to where the puck is going to be, then jailbreakers have usually already been there and left. The hackers and tinkerers that find security loopholes in Apple’s software are some of the most brilliant, innovative minds in the tech world.

We’ll be covering JailbreakCon 2012 this weekend in San Francisco, the world’s first convention dedicated solely to the jailbreak community. What better way to get ready for the future of jailbreaking than to examine the past? Let’s start from the beginning:

An old-as-the-hills Easter Egg has been rediscovered by New York based hacker collective NYC Resistor: hidden pictures of the Macintosh team from 1986 hidden in the Mac SE’s system ROM. The Easter Egg has been known about forever — references to it on the Internet go back to at least 1999 — but more interesting than the Easter Egg itself is how NYC Resistor discovered for themselves how it was done: by good, old fashioned hacking.

There is perhaps no name in the world of hacking as legendary as Geohot. George Hotz was the first person to unlock the original iPhone back in 2007. He was 17 years old at the time. He also released multiple jailbreaks, including “purplera1n” for the iPhone 3GS. Hotz later went on to hack the PlayStation 3 and battle Sony in a high-profile lawsuit.

In a recent profile by The New Yorker, we get a fascinating look at Hotz and several stories from his career as a prolific, self-taught hacker.

iOS hackers are some of the most sought after individuals in the security research community. Geniuses like Comex who come up with jailbreaks used by millions of iPhone and iPad users are offered incredible sums of money to sell their exploits to powerful and high profile clients.

Sure, you could win a decent amount of cash at a security conference for showing off the exploits you’ve uncovered, but why not make $250,000 and secretly sell your stuff to say, an entity like the U.S. government?

Raspberry Pi, the $35 computer-on-a-board developed by a team from Cambridge, UK, went on sale at 6am GMT this morning.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — Last night I was treated to a security demonstration. Cryptography Research director Pankaj Rohatgi pointed a cheap, standard TV antenna at an iPod Touch several feet away, running standard RSA encryption operations.

On the screen of his oscilloscope was a sound-wave generated by his custom software showing distinct troughs at semi-regular intervals. These troughs, and their accompanying flattish peaks, represented the ones and zeroes of the private keys used in every secure communication we make today, sucked right from the iPod. With no further cracking required, all of your private operations can be read as if in plain text.

How is this done? From the electronic noise generated by every microchip as it goes about its processing duties.

If you’re the kind of geeky person who experienced a little thrill of joy when the hacking scene in Tron:Legacy included realistic use of a genuine command line interface, you (or perhaps your kids) might also enjoy playing with Hacker Typer.

Henry D. is an awesome boy hacker out of the UK, and this video of him “pwning” a local Apple Store is just too cute and funny for words.

Thanks to the success of Apple’s iOS devices and its iTunes music store, the company’s iTunes software is installed on more than 250 Million Macs and PCs all over the world, making it one of the most popular media players available. It may not have been so popular, however, had users known it came with a security flaw that allowed government intelligence agencies and the police to monitor them.

An article on Macworld today sheds some light on the Towson Hack — a mysterious scam involving stolen iTunes store credit dating back to November of last year.

Macworld highlights a trafficked thread on the Apple support forums that tells story after story of stolen iTunes gift card credit, initially relating to a changed billing address to Towson, Maryland.

A button-cute 10 year old girl may have just set a new prestigious record. It’s not for the largest number of consecutive jump rope skips, or for chewing a piece of gum for the longest time, or even for collecting the most Facebook friends. It’s for identifying a zero-day exploit in a number of iOS and Android games! Isn’t that cute?

OS X Lion is being hailed by many as the most secure operating system yet, not just from Apple, but in total. In particular, its FileVault encryption rewrite is being widely hailed as one of the most secure, low-overhead ways yet to keep your data safe.

But behind all the talk, there’s a huge security hole in OS X Lion that has been present at least since Snow Leopard. Any Mac with a Firewire port is vulnerable to it, and it’s so easy to exploit that any hacker with physical access to your computer can get your password within minutes.

A 25 year old digital artist who installed a program that secretly took photographs of the people using the Macs at two New York City Apple Stores has had his own computers confiscated by the United States Secret Service. He may face criminal charges.