The man who has reportedly raked in $300,000 from spam operations pleaded guilty to charges of fraud and tax evasion last friday, PC World reports. Aptly dubbed "King of Spam" by authorities, Robert Soloway was arrested in May 2007 by the US Justice Department. He had previously been found guilty of other spam charges including one where he was fined US$7.8 million in a civil case against Microsoft, which he reportedly refused to pay. Soloway's sentence is set to be served on ...

All it took was for a University of Virginia student to finally outsmart the popular SMART cards. Karsten Nohl was reported to have successfully broken the encryption code in RFID (or radio frequency identification) chips used in smart cards. RFID chips can be used for identifying products using radiowaves. These chips act as tags that can be “read” from a certain distance, even beyond the line of sight of the RFID reader. The use of smart cards has been widely popular ...

The myriad of possibilities that hackers can exploit now seems limitless. Just recently, security researchers discovered another apparatus that is vulnerable to possible hacking, this time a heart device, The New York Times reports. The report says it is possible to obtain wireless access to a certain cardiac device which is a combination of heart defibrillator and pacemaker, enabling the person to fully control it. Both devices are used to restore the normal rhythm of the heart through electric shots. When ...

Looks can be deceiving, and the face of cyber crime is getting fresher and fresher. Young computer whizzes lured to the dark side are still very much active, as proven by news that a teen hacker—all of 18 years old—was nabbed in the worldwide effort to put botnet masters behind bars. Owen Thorn Walker of New Zealand, who used the handle “AKILL,” reportedly masterminded a group operating a botnet that has caused losses of $20 million, according to Techworld. Their botnet ...

We have recently blogged about big botnet contender Mega-Dik, to remind people of the pervasiveness of botnets today (and that Storm is not the only force to reckon with in terms of illicitly-acquired distributed computing power). It is thus with great cheer that we pick up this report from Calgary Herald’s Ravensbergen. After observing the activities of the suspected hacking ring in an investigation stretching as far back as 2006, the Quebec police, headed by Capt. Frederick Gaudreau, was able to ...