A new sentence was emitted by a Dutch court against two cyber criminals who are guilty of breaking into millions of computers worldwide and using the hijacked systems in online crimes. 

The leader of the team was sentenced to spend  2 years in prison and to pay a €9,000 fine, while the accomplice got 18 months and a €4,000 fine. 

A  “specialist tech web site"  have recently uncovered viruses on TomTom satellite navigator gear, the news agency Reuters reported in past days.

What is not said , is that the above website is actually the blog of Davey Winder at Daniweb where he provide a deep analysis of the viruses and gives TomTom's responses in full.

There he writes: “It started with an email from a worried satnav user, Lloyd Reid of Trichromic LLP an IT consultant who knows his way around a computer and knows a virus when his AV software flags one up.  The cause for his concern being a newly purchased TomTom GO 910 satnav unit that, once connected to his PC, immediately caused an anti-virus software alert. Not one, but two alerts in fact...”

 Dire straits for Swedish subjects’ online affairs.

Last week it was discovered a $1 million online banking theft against the Scandinavian bank Nordea. The attack was traced to a Russian cracker known by the handle “the Corpse.” Both the attacker’s identity and the nature of the virus are still under investigation, we just know that the virus is a Trojan horse  which works by logging the passwords entered by banking customers.

 The Trojan seems to be a variant of the Haxdoor Trojan that already infected over 2300 computers last October.

This version of the Haxdoor Trojan  was activated when a customer typed the bank’s address into a browser. Passwords were then recorded and used to get the access to online banking accounts. Later, money was transferred to new accounts and cash was finally withdrawn.

Have you recently seen a different Zone-H when trying to access our pages? Magic of DNS redirection.

It appears that Saudi Arabia crackers managed to get the passwords of our registrar (our registrant panel to be precise), accessed the domain management page and changed the DNS entries, pointing the zone-h domain to an IP address belonging to the crackers on which they mounted the page you saw in the last 48 hours.

48 hours!?! So long it took to take contact with the registrar (they work only through email communication), explain the problem to 8 different people then finally getting a reset of our credentials, taking the domain back in control.  

  On the funny side, the same problem happened to Google in its German version which yesterday evening was redirected to a different page (different owner actually). In this case (automatic German/English translation) the trick was a bogus domain transfer request that a German provider accepted without explicit authorization from Google Inc. (silence-consense).

What a day! We are so glad we deserve so much of attention.

 PS: you will  soon find the mirrors in our DB as even though Zone-H wasn't hacked, from the users' point of view it appeared defaced, as only a few users realized they weren't visiting the actual Zone-H server. From the historycal point of view exactly the same incident happened to the Al jazeera sat tv network website, where a hacker managed to trick the registrar to send him the domain control passwords after sending a bogus passport copy during the ID verification process, subsequently changing Al Jazeera's DNS pointing to a different server. 

 Doomsday clock has been moved. Magazines and Newspapers informed on Thursday about the shift of the famous clock that was created in 1947 to remind the humankind of the time left before its final destruction due to  a nuclear war. 

As reported by USA Today,  the decision to move the clock was taken in answer to recent facts and controversies about the distribution of nuclear technology.

It must be, judging from the challenge offered up by security firm iDefense.

The firm, held by the online certificate company Verisign, announced a competition that would pay security researchers upwards to $12,000usd for a working exploit that can leverage Microsoft's IE7 web browser to run arbitrary code on a users machine.