Official fb Accounts of Garanti Bankası, Denizbank, Renault Turkey, Ülker, Nokia Turkey, Burger King and Acun.com Hacked

The official Facebook accounts of several companies were hacked on Thursday night by a group of hackers trying to promote the terrorist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

The pro-PKK hackers changed the Facebook profile pictures of the following companies: Garanti Bankası, Denizbank, Renault Turkey, Ülker, Nokia Turkey, Burger King and Acun.com. They placed the picture of Abdullah Öcalan, the jailed leader of the terrorist PKK organization, on the profiles instead.

The digital marketing agency 41? 29!, which manages the Facebook accounts of these companies, reported on Thursday night that most of the accounts had been restored to their original state.

The head of the agency, Alemşah Öztürk, said on Twitter on Thursday night that they were working to restore the Facebook accounts in cooperation with Facebook, Inc.

The agency also stated on its Facebook account that as soon as it discovered the attack, it notified Facebook, which immediately deactivated the hacked accounts.

Stating that this situation did not constitute a security risk for the followers of the accounts in question, the agency also added that there has been no loss of data from the companies' accounts.

Follow @thehackersmedia

Hacker who swindled $3m held in Dubai hotel

According to media reports, the incident came to light when a UAE trader who lost $3million filed a complaint with Dubai Police. The victim, who had business connections with the said Chinese firm, received an email from the company requesting him to transfer $3million to its account.

He duly transferred the amount because he was used to dealing with huge sums of money with the company. He never confirmed with the officials in China if they received the amount because such transactions were common between them, he told investigating officials.

However, a few days later he learnt that the email he received was not sent by the company.

He immediately filed a complaint and investigations by the anti-crimes department of Dubai Police revealed that the company website had been hacked by the suspect. He not only obtained important data but also used the offical email id to contact its clients and defraud millions.

The suspect was tracked down and arrested from a Dubai hotel. His bank accounts are frozen and he is referred to Public Prosecution.

Follow @thehackersmedia

Statement From Jeremy Hammond, Alleged Hacker

I remember maybe a few months before I was locked up I went to a few noise demonstrations a the federal jail MCC Chicago in support of all those locked up there. Prisoners moved in front of the windows, turned the lights on and off, and dropped playing cards through the cracks in the windows. I had no idea I would soon be in that same jail facing multiple trumped up computer hacking “conspiracies.”

Now at New York MCC, the other day I was playing chess when another prisoner excitedly cam e up as was like, “Yo, there are like 50 people outside the window and they are carrying banners with your name!” Sure enough, there you all were with lights, banners, and bucket drums just below our 11th floor window. Though you may not have been able to here us or see us, over one hundred of us in this unit saw you all and wanted to know who those people were, what they were about, rejuvenated knowing people on the outside got there back.

As prisoners in this police state – over 2.5 million of us – we are silenced, marginalized, exploited, forgotten, and dehumanized. First we are judged and sentenced by the “justice” system, then treated as second class citizens by mainstream society. But even the warden of MCC New York has in surprising honesty admitted that “the only difference between us officers here and you prisoners is we just haven’t been caught.”

The call us robbers and fraudsters when the big banks get billion dollar bailouts and kick us out of our homes.

They call us gun runners and drug dealers when pharmaceutical corporations and defense contractors profit from trafficking armaments and drugs on a far greater scale.

They call us “terrorists” when NATO and the US military murder millions of innocents around the world and employ drones and torture tactics.

And they call us cyber criminals when they themselves develop viruses to spy on and wage war against infrastructure and populations in other countries.

Yes, I am one of several dozen around the world accused of Anonymous-affiliated computer hacking charges.

One of many here at MCCC New York facing trumped up “conspiracy” charges based on the cooperation of government informants who will say anything and sell out anyone to save themselves.

And this jail is one of several thousand other jails, prisons, and immigrant detention centers – lockups which one day will be reduced to rubble and grass will grow between the cracks of the concrete.

So don’t let fear of imprisonment deter you from speaking up and fighting back. Silencing our movement is exactly what they hope to accomplish with these targeted, politically motivated prosecutions. They can try to stop a few of us but they can never stop us all.

Follow @thehackersmedia

2 Million OS X Mountain Lion Copies Sold in 48 Hours

Apple’s latest Mac platform release, the OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, has seen great response from users right from the start.

The Cupertino-based company managed to sell two million copies of the new OS X in only 48 hours after the official launch, in line with the success last year’s Lion platform registered.

The new platform release comes with an appealing price tag, namely $19.99, which has certainly contributed to its success.

Moreover, the platform was offered for free to all those who purchased a new Mac machine after June 11th, 2012.

However, it should be noted that Apple hasn’t yet provided official numbers on Mountain Lion sales, but that the info comes from Chitika, which estimates 2.11 million copies of the OS being sold in the first two days of availability.

The new operating system comes with a wide range of enhancements when compared to the OS X Lion release, Apple counting no less than 200 of them.

Download Link From Sofpedia : http://mac.softpedia.com/get/System-Utilities/OS-X-Mountain-Lion.shtml

Chitika Insights also notes that there are over 45 percent of Mac users still running OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, but that all those using 10.6.6 or higher could upgrade their systems to 10.8.

Follow @thehackersmedia

Carly Rae Jepsen Hacked, Naked Photos Stolen

On Wednesday, the “Call Me Maybe” hit-maker told the police that the hacker stole her nude photos and tried to sell them to the media.

These are not the fake ones that have surfaced the internet few months ago; these are actually the real ones that have never seen before.. and the Canadian-born singer is desperately trying to secure it down.

TMZ reports that Jepsen’s camp received an anonymous tip about the photos back in March… and immediately called the Vancouver Police Department to report the cyber crime.

For more Carly Rae Jepsen news and updates, bookmark our homepage, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook and we will keep you posted directly on your news feeds.

Follow @thehackersmedia

Anonymous Rattles A Chinese Web Giant

Anonymous may be best known for knocking websites offline or stealing data, but one faction of the movement is subverting figures of power in a more circumspect way — by trawling through documents and computer code.

The sub group Anonymous Analytics released a damning report yesterday about Qihoo, the Chinese web giant that claims to be the No. 1 provider of Internet and mobile security products and services in China, as measured by its user base.

Qihoo distributes antivirus software called 360 Safeguard and has a browser called 360 Secure Browser, but in recent years has restructured it business to focus on selling online advertising space, in particular from a single directory page, hao.360.cn. The company claims to get approximately 90% of its advertising revenue “directly or indirectly” from this page and its sub pages; advertising accounted for 73% of the company’s total revenue in 2011 of $22.9 million.

That figure marked an increase of 136% from the year before, meaning hao.360.cn is a serious money-maker for Qihoo. Qihoo recently said that it charged, on average, 1 million yuan  ($156,000) per month, per link on the “Famous Sites” section of its directory page — a breed of e-commerce widely known to have dwindled in Western cyberspace.

Anonymous Analytics says there’s something fishy about Qihoo’s directory page. Qihoo recently claimed on its fourth quarter conference call that the page was getting 20% more web traffic than dominant-player Baidu’s similar page and its sub pages, hao123.com. Qihoo confirmed this with me, citing a table of figures from iResearch.

But the Anonymous group claims that Qihoo is “grotesquely exaggerating” its traffic advantage, and their evidence comes in the form of a recent change in the source code of hao.360.cn. Having been monitoring the site since last year, the group noticed that a comScore tag had been added to Qihoo’s HTML source code. (ComScore is the best-known, third-party verifier of a web site’s traffic.)

This seemed fine, until the tag was removed on or around June 20, 2012. Why? Anonymous Analytics thinks that Qihoo didn’t like the figures it was seeing. The group then managed to get what it claims are the actual comScore figures through unnamed third parties — “people we trust,” according to the group’s representative — who had bought them from comScore. The figures show that in the months of February, March and April 2012, Qihoo’s all-important directory page had 56%, 51% and 52% less traffic than Baidu’s.

Anonymous Analytics provided me with what appears to be a legitimate document from comScore showing web traffic figures for Baidu and Qihoo’s main directory pages in April 2012. It states that Baidu’s directory page had 84.689 million unique visitors from China, while Qihoo’s had 40.877 million.

The activist group believes that before Qihoo balked at the figures, it had added the comScore tag to appease analysts, investors and critics, “who have called for management to provide independent verification of Qihoo’s traffic claims.”

The group further believes that management installed the tag with a view figuring out how to manipulate comScore’s traffic analytics. “We are so certain of this that we invite engineers at comScore to analyze data coming out of hao.360.cn since the beginning of the year,” Anonymous Analytics says.

Follow @thehackersmedia

NSA Turns To Hackers To Make Internet Secure From Cyber Attackers

The National Security Agency has sought the help of professional hackers to render the World Wide Web more secure.

Reports from the PCWorld and Reuters indicate that General Keith B Alexander, Director, National Security Agency sought the help of hackers while addressing the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas July 27.

Speaking at the conference, General Alexander said: “This is the world’s best cybersecurity community. In this room right here is the talent our nation needs to secure cyberspace,” PCWorld reported.

Urging a collaborative approach to secure the cyberspace, Gen. Alexander, who also head of the U.S. Cyber Command and Central Security Service, urged hackers to partner with government and industry to realize the objective.

Stating that hackers can educate others who do not understand cybersecurity, the NSA Chief said: “You know that we can protect networks and have civil liberties and privacy and you can help us get there.”

The rare courtship of NSA Chief and hackers seems to have come on the heels of increased cyberattacks against U.S. cyber infrastructure. ThePCWorld report cited a 17-fold increase in cyberattacks reported against the Federal Government between 2009 and 2011.

Gen. Alexander urged the hacker community to continue building better tools that were needed to protect the cyberspace citing examples of Metasploit and other penetration testing tools, PCWorld added.

Seeking hackers support in defending the nation against cyberattacks, Gen. Alexander rued: “The issue is that if you don’t see a cyberattack you can’t defend against it and at the moment, the NSA has no insight if Wall Street is going to be attacked, for (an) example.”

Urging cooperation from the industry, Alexander called on the corporate to share at least limited pieces of information from their intrusion detection systems in real-time so that NSA could follow up such instances of aberration.

Gen. Alexander stressed on joint evolution of standards post-information sharing as the key to secure critical infrastructure and sensitive networks.

Gen. Alexander’s presence at the Defcon was hailed as a rare occurrence as Jeff Moss, Founder, Defcon, revealed

Follow @thehackersmedia