Hack Blogspot

In 1998, a hacker told Congress that he could bring down the Internet in 30 minutes by exploiting a certain flaw that sometimes caused online outages by misdirecting data. In 2003, the Bush administration concluded that fixing this flaw was in the nation's "vital interest." Fast forward to 2010, and very little has happened to improve the situation. The flaw still causes outages every year. Although most of the outages are innocent and fixed quickly, the problem still could be exploited by a hacker to spy on data traffic or take down websites. Meanwhile, our reliance on the Internet has only increased. The next outage, accidental or malicious, could disrupt businesses, the government or anyone who needs the Internet to run normally. The outages are caused by the somewhat haphazard way that traffic is passed between companies that carry Internet data. The outages are called "hijackings," even though most of them are not caused by criminals bent on destruction...

Some instances of Internet outages caused by hijacked traffic, as listed by the Department of Homeland Security and other sources: April 1997: MAI Network Services, an Internet service provider in Virginia, passes bad routing information to Sprint, which relays it, causing widespread outages. April 1998: An Israeli ISP causes widespread outages. December 1999: AT&T's server network is hijacked by another ISP. May 2000: Sprint addresses hijacked by another ISP. April 2001: Global Internet carrier Flag Telecom hijacks routes. December 2004: Turk Telekom, a Turkish ISP, hijacks much of the Internet on Christmas Eve. September 2005: AT&T, XO and BellSouth traffic is misdirected to Bolivia. The next day, it's sent to Germany instead.

Web 2.0 has spawned a new generation of Internet scams -- let's call them "Cons 2.0." It's not as easy to dupe users as it used to be, but increasingly sophisticated social engineering strategies -- coupled with a growing acceptance of loss of control over one's personal data -- has made the Web a more dangerous neighborhood than ever. Still, there are steps you can take to protect yourself. Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace rely on the trusted nature of the relationship between friends, colleagues, associates and followers. Unfortunately, the level of trust that end-users invest in each other is also being applied to the makers of applications and is perhaps a little over-optimistic. Increasingly, cybercriminals are being drawn by the possibilities opened up by application development on popular Web 2.0 Web sites with the promise of more money, which results in more infections and more potential for something to go horribly wrong with comput...