The US government obtained secret court orders to force Google Inc and a small Internet provider to hand over information from email accounts of a WikiLeaks volunteer, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

The US request included email addresses of people that Jacob Appelbaum, a volunteer for the campaigning website, had corresponded with in the past two years, but not the full emails, the newspaper said, citing documents it had reviewed.

Internet provider Sonic said it fought the government order legally and lost, and was forced to turn over information, the company’s chief executive, Dane Jasper, told the newspaper.

Appelbaum, 28, has not been charged with any wrongdoing, the daily said.

Google, the world’s Number 1 search engine, declined to comment on the matter, the Wall Street Journal said.

WikiLeaks last year angered the US government by making public tens of thousands of secret US files and diplomatic cables that embarrassed Washington, as well as a classified video of a contested American military operation in Iraq.

The Google order dated January 4, 2011, directed the search giant to turn over IP address from which Appelbaum logged into his Gmail.com account and the email and IP addresses of the users with whom he communicated dating back to November 1, 2009.

It isn’t clear whether Google fought the order or turned over documents, the Journal said.

The controversial court orders are expected to add fuel to a growing debate over a controversial law – the Electronic Communications Privacy Act – that allows the US government to secretly obtain information from people’s email and cellphones without a search warrant.

This year, micro-blogging website Twitter fought a similar court order to hand over details of the accounts of several WikiLeaks supporters, including Appelbaum, as part of a criminal investigation launched by the Department of Justice into the major leaking of confidential US documents.

Appelbaum is a developer for the Tor Project Inc., a nonprofit organization that provides free tools that help people maintain their anonymity online, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Twitter has not turned over information from the accounts of the Wikileaks supporters, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the investigation.

Originally posted

Three suspected computer hackers who allegedly belong to a loose-knit international activist group that hacked into New Zealand Government websites, have been arrested in Spain.

Spain’s National Police said today the three detainees were leaders of the Spanish section of a group that calls itself ”Anonymous” and has attacked corporate and government websites around the world – New Zealand included.

The Associated Press reported police said a computer server in one of their homes was used to co-ordinate and carry out the cyber attacks on targets including two major Spanish banks, the Italian energy company Enel and the governments of Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Iran, Chile, Colombia and New Zealand.

New Zealand’s Parliamentary Service suffered website outages last month after threats from ”Anonymous”, protesting against changes to copyright law.

That attack and others have led the Government to set up a new cyber bodyguard to protect high-risk government agencies from attacks by cyber spies and criminals.

The National Cyber Security Centre, announced by Communications and Information Technology Minister Steven Joyce this week, will also take on the functions of the Centre for Critical Infrastructure Protection, which helps protect critical national infrastructure such as the computer networks of banks and power companies.

Mr Joyce said the centre would be larger than the CCIP but its establishment would be funded from the existing budget of the Government Communications Security Bureau.

He said the Government was aware of ”a variety of cyber threats to New Zealand interests” but he could not give details for reasons of national security.

The centre will be part of a new cyber-security strategy that includes a consumer education programme with organisations such as Netsafe.

The Spanish police statement said the only other countries to act against ”Anonymous” so far are the United States and Britain. It attributed this what it called complex security measures that members use to protect their identity.

The suspects in Spain were arrested in Barcelona, Valencia and the southern city of Almeria, the statement said without specifying when the detainees were picked up.

Since October 2010, Spanish police specialising in cyber crime have analysed more than two million lines of online chat and Internet pages until they finally zeroed in on the three suspects. Their names were not given.

In January, British police arrested five young males on suspicion of involvement in cyber attacks by Anonymous, which has backed WikiLeaks.

”Anonymous” has claimed responsibility for attacking the websites of companies such as Visa, Mastercard and Paypal, all of whom severed their links with WikiLeaks after it began publishing its massive trove of secret US diplomatic memos.

”Anonymous” accused the companies of trying to stifle WikiLeaks and rallied an army of online supporters to flood their servers with traffic, periodically blocking access to their sites for hours at a time.

And in February, an Internet forum run by ”Anonymous” directed participants to attack the websites of the Egyptian Ministry of Information and the ruling National Democratic Party.

In a Twitter post, the group claimed credit for taking down the ministry’s website and said the group was motivated by a desire to support Egyptian pro-democracy protesters.

Originally posted

As earlier reported there has been a huge dump of accounts, data and personal information from a huge range of websites and this comes from a hacker by the name of Stohanko. All together we have count 101 sites, huge amount of data and personal information which ranges from  emails, phone numbers, full names and address. There is a lot of clear text passwords and also fair share of encrypted passwords.

If you look down thru the list below you will see a fair few well known big company’s have been hacked and lots of other smaller websites as well. they also range from many different countries such as Australia, new zealand, china, Africa and many more showing this is not a isolated attack.

IT still continues to show that administrations needs to sort stuff out so this stops happening. so far this past few months we have seen countless amounts of websites, data and hacking going on.

Konka, a New Zealand website was one of the 101 websites that was hacked.

Originally posted

Online users visiting the MetService website may have contracted a computer virus from malware hidden on the site.

Visitors to the MetService website this week may have been exposed to a computer virus, after its ad server was hacked.

The weather forecaster today confirmed that at 8pm yesterday its web support team identified an issue with its ad server and immediately shut it down.

“We now know that the ad server was compromised by a malicious attack,” MetService said.

“A file containing JavaScript code was uploaded to our ad database, causing the browser of anyone viewing an ad on our website to be redirected to a website which downloads malware files.”

This came as MetService reported record number of visitors to the site because of the severe polar blast lashing the country this week.

It was estimated the site was at risk for about four hours.

The source of the attack was traced to an overseas IP address, “but this is sure to be merely the start of a long trail that may never lead back to the culprit”, MetService said.

The site was now safe to access.

– NZPA