Hacking and all the other malicious web activities seem to take a toll on not only common man but governments too these days. After the recent hacking of DOJ and FBI websites by Anonymous group, there is another hacking attack that has taken place recently in Poland. A hacking group has recently cast its spell upon the Polish government website. The group calls themselves as “Polish Underground” and has taken the charge of wrecking the havoc and stated the anti-piracy legislation as the chief reason for the same.

Prior to this attack, the popular hacktevist group, Anoynomus had targeted the official websites of Poland president, prime minister and parliament to raise voice against Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

Poland had signed the agreement for creating international standards for the protection of intellectual property. However, the government failed to consult with the masses over the same issue, the higher authorities did feel the need to discuss the issue with the public later on.

“This morning the content on the www.kprm.gov.pl website was modified. As a result the server was switched off and secured, the site will be transferred to another server during the course of the day,” the government said in a statement early Monday.

The anti-piracy bills – SOPA and PIPA have caused a stir apparently and all the major Internet giants like Wikipedia have joined the league of protesters along with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg.

“The ACTA agreement in no way changes Polish laws or the rights of Internet users and Internet usage,” Michal Boni, the minister of administration and digitization said.

Anonymous is a well-known name when it comes to hacking and malicious activities. Any sort of harmful Internet activities bring them into question. After wrecking havoc on major names like Citigroup and Sony, the group has recently targeted the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) websites along with FBI and various other entertainment industry websites that were brought down and showed error messages.

Anonymous have wrecked the havoc right after the protests for SOPA and PIPA took place. Other websites that fell prey to the hacking attack also included Recording Industry of America, BMI.com and Universal music. The websites showed error messages when accessed and many of these were also disabled totally.

Owing to the recent anti-piracy campaigns SOPA and PIPA, which were undertaken by both the government and entertainment industry, Anonymous have taken such a step, which they call as retribution. MegaUpload, another media content website is also one of the victims of the attacks.

Anoynomus has taken responsibility of the attack via Twitter. “This action is among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States,” the Department of Justice and FBI said in a joint statement. The hacketivist group claims this to be the “largest attack ever” that involved over 5,600 participants.

DOJ further added: “The Department of Justice web server hosting justice.gov is currently experiencing a significant increase in activity, resulting in a degradation in service. The department is working to ensure the website is available while we investigate the origins of this activity, which is being treated as a malicious act until we can fully identify the root cause of the disruption.”

Anonymous had given the information about their protest in their official Twitter account as well.

The biggest cyber crime of this year took place in South Africa where hackers targeted a post bank and took away US$ 6.7 million

From time to time, online criminals are becoming active. In recent times, a group of hackers targeted a reputed bank in South Africa. According to the reports, hackers involved in South African post bank robbery made a special strategy to withdraw US$ 6.7 million and that too directly from various ATMs of a renowned bank. It is not the first time hackers have carried out such an act. But this particular robbery shows that how they are applying newer techniques to steal such a big amount.

To begin the robbery, the hackers secretly deployed a backdoor file with the purpose of gaining remote access to the bank’s computer. Once they were successful in accessing the main computer, they created a few dummy accounts.

Once the dummy accounts got active, the intruders waited for the right day to execute their plan. And it was on the New Year’s Eve when the hackers took advantage of the bank holiday to transfer hefty amounts in various fake accounts. And between one or three days, the intruders siphoned out US$ 6.7 million through separate ATMs located in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and Free State. This shows that the bank was not fully equipped with enhanced intrusion detection system which could have stopped such an incident. At the time of investigation, it was identified that, cyber criminals were smart enough in increasing the limit of taking out cash from an ATM machine in order to get a large amount of cash.

In addition to this, the police informed the bank that login ID of a call center agent along with a teller was exploited. The bank has not updated its official website so far. Seeing the current scenario, it is important for every single bank to install efficient security programs to deal with backdoor Trojans and suspicious attacks which are quite active on the Internet.

U.S. Federal Authorities have started taking strict measures against all forms of piracy. The recent action taken against piracy is the closure of popular file-sharing site Megaupload.com for alleged facilitation of illegal downloads of copyrighted films, music, TV shows, and other entertainment contents.

MegaLoad is considered as a “digital locker” website, which provides access to view and download its stored files. According to the Federal indictment, the site owners have profited more than US$ 175 million, causing an estimated loss of US$ 500 million to copyright holders in revenue. Four of the site operators have been arrested in New Zealand, while others are on the loose. The Federal authorities have executed more than 20 search warrants in the U.S. and other countries and have confiscated US$ 50 million in assets. They also have been successful in cracking 18 domain names that were run from servers in Virginia and Washington D.C.

The accused have been charged with various forms of conspiracy, including racketeering, copyright infringement, and others. Each may face a maximum prison term of 55 years. Surprising, what was not mentioned on the indictment list is rapper Kasseem Dean, who has been reported by the New York Post as the CEO of MegaUpload.

However, the site operators will fight a legal battle against the accusations made. “Our initial impression is that the allegations are without merit and MegaUpload is going to vigorously contest them,” said Ira Rothken, attorney for MegaUpload. He also added, “We have deep concerns over due process and assets being taken without the opportunity for a hearing.”

Whatever the outcome of the legal battle is going to be, the action against piracy would surely be welcomed by the entertainment industry, which has been incurring loss of millions of dollars due to piracy.

A survey conducted by the World Economic Forum names Cyber Attack as the fourth highest global risk for our planet. During the survey, the organization interviewed at least 460 experts from different fields and pointed out 50 global risks that can happen in the next 10 years.

The top five risks that made to the list are as follows:

1. Severe income disparity
2. Chronic fiscal imbalance
3. Rising green house gas emission
4. Cyber attacks
5. Water supply crisis

“The annual study details 50 risks across five categories based on a survey of 469 experts. It is the first time that a technological threat has made it into the top five since 2007 when a breakdown of critical information infrastructure was number one,” writes Chris Martin from The Inquirer.

Experts say that Cyber Attack listing as the fourth highest global risk is not a surprise because of many incidents that are happening in the digital world. The increase in the activities of hackers hacking websites to get users’ sensitive information like credit cards, spammers spreading fake advertisement to fool users to earn illegal money, companies being attacked by hackers leading to great damage, etc. are all signs that the digital world is not safe anymore.

“With over five billion mobile phones coupled with Internet connectivity and cloud-based applications, daily life is more vulnerable to cyber threats and digital disruptions,” said the survey report.

A full report of the survey named Global Risks 2012 is already published by the World Economic Forum. Click here to get full information about the survey.

Hackers leave no stone unturned to carry out their malicious spamming activities. Although antivirus programs provide complete protection against such activities, hackers still manage to get though majority of security walls. This time, hackers have managed to victimize McAfee, which is a leading name in the antivirus domain.

McAfee customers reported that their e-mail services were blocked and IP addresses were blacklisted since spammers were sending spam messages by using a loophole in McAfee’s RumorServer relay service. There is due to a major bug in McAfee SaaS Total Protection antimalware service.

Hence, in order to curb this problem, McAfee is planning to release a fix for this issue this week. David Marcus, the director of security research at McAfee Labs said that the reports of any identity thefts and data loss haven’t been reported yet.

Marcus said: “The patch will be released on January 18 or 19, as soon as we have finished testing because this is a managed product, all affected customers will automatically receive the patch when it is released. The first issue has much in common with a similar issue patched in August 2011.” He further added, “In fact, the patch delivered then basically cuts off the exploitation path for this issue, effectively reducing the risk to zero. Because of this, customer data is not directly at risk.”

McAfee said that the issues are only restricted to SaaS Total Protection and the other products and services are unharmed. The first bug has already been blocked by a patch in August and now it’s time to work upon the second one.