Amother Dark Day -- Jeremy Hammond Gets 10 Years (video)

Hacktivist Jeremy Hammond was sentenced yesterday to 10 years in prison and three years of supervised release for a damaging, politically motivated computer intrusion at the private intelligence firm Stratfor in 2011. The 28-year-old Chicagoan pleaded guilty earlier this year to hacking the servers of Strategic Forecasting, Inc., where he wiped out files and databases and stole 5 million private email messages and 60,000 customer credit card numbers. The emails went to WikiLeaks, while the credit cards were used by Anonymous to rack up $700,000 in fraudulent donations to non-profit groups.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/11/hammond-sentence/

Pirate Bay Hacked, User Info Exposed!

O.K., I'd say that something like the above would qualify as an "alarmist headline," but that's very similar to how TorrentFreak.com chose to pitch an admittedly important story, but not one that gives TPB users cause to head for the bunkers.

In short, TPB did get hacked, but thankfully all evidence so far indicates that it was a benign hack. Here are excerpts from TorrentFreak's overall quite good coverage of what happened.

An Argentinian hacker, called Ch Russó,

who claims to be [a] researcher born in Buenos Aires, has published a video that shows how he got into the Pirate Bay admin panel. Here, the hacker could manage all torrents in the site’s database with full admin access. In addition, Russó shows that he had access to sensitive user information such as IP-addresses and emails.

The Pirate Bay told TF that

several people are currently looking into the issue while the site is offline for upgrades. The downtime is not related to the hack, but it will be used to solve the vulnerabilities. "We decided to rewrite all database-handling anyway, since it was 6 years old."

The TF article continues:

According to our source at The Pirate Bay, who didn’t want to give out too many details at the moment, the hackers were only able to execute the SQL injections after they gained access to the admin panel.

Russó claims that he has no bad intentions and that he merely wants to inform the public that their information is not as secure as they like it to be. A humble goal, wrongly executed. In the process he exposes several email addresses and other privacy sensitive information that is clearly visible in the video.

Although the information obtained by Russó might be worth a few bucks to some interested anti-piracy outfits, he has no plans to sell any of the information to any third parties.

[. . . .]

The Pirate Bay folks on the other hand are confident that the problem will be fixed during the current downtime period. They further assured us that it was impossible for the hackers to find out the true passwords of the site’s users.

Just an F.Y.I.