DudeUGotHacked

[dudeugothacked-blog]

Facebook 2-step verification. Protect yourself!

[dudeugothacked-blog]

Albert Gonzalez. Responsible for stealing 170 million credit and debit card numbers!!

[dudeugothacked-blog]

Anonymous. Hackers responsible for the Sarah Palin e-mail hack!

[dudeugothacked-blog]

U of M social media accounts #hacked

[dudeugothacked-blog]

University Hack?

I am a student at a large University filled with over 40,000 students, probably some of which know how to hack or have hacked at some point in their life. This made me wonder about what would happen if a major hack took place within the university. Who would be involved? How would it happen? I looked into a case study done on a hack involving the University of Michigan.

On August 12 at 3:30am, hack posts with inappropriate content surfaced on the University of Michigan’s most popular pages: Michigan Football, Michigan Basketball, and Michigan Athletics. The community alerted IT, which alerted staff, and by 6:00am it was all over the news. The hacker banned all university accounts from administrative access on any of these pages.  After investigation, Facebook said the hack was a phishing scheme found within Facebook Messenger. They gained access to one employee’s account, and within this they had access any page to which the individual had administrative privileges.

The main message from this case study was that this hack happened from a really easy concept: stealing someone’s password. It happened to university employees, but affected the entire community as well. The University of Michigan emphasized how important it is to be safe on Facebook and make sure you are using 2- step verification. This feature allows you to have a secret code sent to your phone or email if you are logging in from a new computer. This can prevent hacking in many ways. The affects of this hack were not very immense, compared to what could have happened if they did not stop the hack sooner. All of the company’s private information could have been found and stolen. Luckily for them, it was just a few nasty posts on Facebook.

http://socialmedia.umich.edu/blog/hacked/

[dudeugothacked-blog]

Hacker Behavior

Now that we know the reasons people hack, I thought it would be interesting to find out about different kinds of hackers. What kind of hackers go so far to commit the biggest crimes in the world? I stumbled about a journal article called “The classification of hackers by knowledge exchange behaviors.” 

Researchers studied 2053 users, and divided them up into 4 different kinds of hackers based on the kind of work they do and the kinds of messages they leave. The categories were: Guru Hackers, Casual Hackers, Learning Hackers, and Novice Hackers.

GURU hackers: The study found that 288 of the users were identified as guru hackers. These individuals have a very high reputation score. This means that they continuously offer help and share their knowledge. These hackers typically engage in discussions involving sophisticated hacking techniques. Overall, they are very knowledgeable and helpful to others trying to learn hack. 

CASUAL hackers: The study found 676 users to be casual hackers. These users write shorter messages and ask fewer questions.  They are not as active, and tend to interact with few other users. They are informed to a pretty well extend, but only interested in learning about the newest and latest information.

LEARNING hackers: 706 users in the study were identified as learning hackers. These users are constantly interacting and trying to learn more. After learning, they are quick to post help and knowledge to other users in the community.

NOVICE hackers: 18.75% users were categorized as novice hackers. These users tend to ask many questions, but do not share any knowledge or information. They know little about hacking and rely on outside sources.

 After reading this article it made me wonder about who is doing the biggest hacks for the money, information and revenge I wrote about. At a first glance, I initially thought, “Of course! It must be the guru hackers. They know everything about everything.” When I read about learning hackers, my mind started to wander. Why are these users trying so hard to learn hack? Do they have something in mind they are trying to do. Clearly they are not naturals, so they might be looking to cause corruption or get back at somebody. What do you think?

[dudeugothacked-blog]

Why Do Hackers Do It?

I looked into case studies from the biggest hacks of all time to get an idea of the motives behind major hacks. The first one that caught my eye was called “Operation Get Rich.” The title says it all. Alberto Gonzalez and his crew used SQL injections to steal 170 million ATM and credit card numbers from major retailers. If you shopped at retailers like TJ Maxx, DSW, or Dave & Busters, you might very well have been one of their victims. He took the numbers he stole and sold them at auction.. leaving him with, well, millions of dollars.

A more recent attack comes from China. Chinese cyber criminals stole design files for over 24 critical weapons systems. This included critical missile defense programs.

Next one I read about was titled “Spamhaus DDOS.” This was the first attack that almost broke the whole Internet. Spamhaus is apparently one of the worlds largest spam blocking services. An account, Cyberbunker, found that their emails were black listed, so they attacked with one of the largest denial of service attacks the Internet has ever seen.

Next up, PlayStation Network Hack. In 2011, Sony’s PlayStation Network was attacked and resulted in the loss of data from 77 million user accounts. A lot of information we are talking – mostly personally identifiable information.

So, after reading dozens of cases on hacking, I thought these give the best imagine of why hacking takes place in the first place. All of the reasons came as no surprise to me, of course, because of human nature. We all want money, power, and even sometimes revenge. With the digital age, human qualities are being shown through computers.

http://www.tested.com/tech/456273-biggest-computer-hacks-all-time/item/operation-get-rich/

[dudeugothacked-blog]

Famous Hackers - and a lesson for you

Ok, so now I am all into this hacking stuff and want to know just about everything about it. I did some research on the biggest hackers in history

According to Business Insider, the most infamous hackers to date are:

 1. Adrian Lamo: hacked into the New York Times in 2002 and stole private information from more than 3,000 who had contributed to op-ed articles.

 2. Vladimir Levin: hacked into Citibank’s computers and stole $10 million in 1995

 3. Albert Gonzalez: stole millions of personal credit card and debit card numbers

 4. Gary McKinnon: hacked into 97 American military networks in 2001 and tried to prove UFO’s in hack attacks

 5. Kevin Poulsen: hacked into LA phone networks to win himself a prize from a radio show

 6. The Syrian Electronic Army: This famous hacker does not steal data. They cause widespread destruction and distribute denial of service.

 7. Max Ray "Iceman" Butler: stole 2 million credit card numbers and ran over 86 million in fraudulent charges in 2007

 8. Astra: Greek hacker who stole weapons technology data and sold it to many countries

 9. Anonymous: “hacktivist” group known for launching online hacking campaigns

 10. Kevin Mitnick: best known hacker to date – hacked into cell phones and stole secret code from companies

 The hacker that caught my attention was the group called “Anonymous.” I remember hearing about these guys all over the Internet. I decided to look into their attacks and understand the kind of hacking taking place, and how they were doing it.

I came across the attack on Sarah Palin’s e-mail. The hacker from Anonymous was named “Rubico.” Rubico hacked into her emails because he claimed that he was looking for something that would “derail her campaign.” The hacker did not find anything from her emails. The reason this story was so interesting to me way not the what, considering nothing came out of this hack. It was the how.

Rubico leaked passwords and screenshots of her account to Wikileaks. How did he find her password to get into her account? It was probably some serious computer science coding to do a hack like this, right? Nope. It was nothing short of just knowing the woman’s birth date. Rubico simply looked up a Wikipedia article on Sarah Palin to find her birthday and that is how he got into her account to change her password. Her security question for when he hit “forgot password,” was her birthday. This relates back to the blog I posted on safety and how to protect yourself from being hacked.

Sarah Palin probably did not think she was doing anything wrong by having her birthday as a security question. This is an easy common mistake I am sure we all make. We choose questions we will always know the answer to, with answers that will never change. This shows how easy it is for someone to hack you and how careful you need to be when choosing passwords and security questions.

 http://www.businessinsider.com/the-10-most-infamous-hackers-of-all-time-2015-4?op=1/#vin-mitnick-10

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_events_associated_with_Anonymous

[dudeugothacked-blog]

Protect Yourself!

After writing about the story of my mom, I got feedback from a few people asking how safe Facebook is to use and how to better protect themselves. This was something even I was unsure of. I did some research to explain it. I learned it is not just Facebook you need to protect yourself from, but even the little things we need to watch out for:

http://www.essence.com/2014/10/14/how-protect-yourself-getting-hacked

This article offers 10 ways to protect yourself against hackers.

I had to laugh at #7, which reads "Do not use your boyfriend's or girlfriend's computers to login to your accounts." Hopefully this is the least of your worries, if so I think you need a new significant other. Tips on finding a new one can be found here: Tinder

Ok so, other than that these are some really helpful tips. When I first read the article, I thought wow these are so obvious. Then I went through again and realized I do actually do most of the things this is recommending not to do.

The most important tip that I'm sure you all do is #8 "Stay clear of free wifi." I don't know about you, but I look for free public Wifi just about everywhere I go. If I'm not on wifi, my cell phone bill will pay for it. I never realized this is literally giving any place, store, location access to all of the information on my computer.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Seriously, protect yourself! It is so easy for someone to hack into your computer or any of your accounts, so read these tips to prevent it!

[dudeugothacked-blog]

My Experience

To get started, I want my readers to know this is a blog for hacking beginners or those who want some simple entertainment. I am using this blog to take you on the journey of my research about hacking. My posts may be random, or relate to previous posts if I find new information on it. If you want more information or want to request a topic, feel free to comment!

So, this past week I was thinking about my own personal experiences with hacking. I’ll tell you a little bit about hacking encounters in my life to give you a glimpse of how often it can happen, and how easily it can occur. My first hacking experience came about when I was a sophomore in high school. Someone had hacked into my Facebook account and stolen a ton of information (my photos, email, etc.). A few days later my account had a completely different name, "Jennifer Smith.” At first, I was confused. This was in 2011, when hacking was a bit more uncommon. It was before we saw all of those fake accounts on Facebook, Instagram and now Snapchat becoming more common.

My second real experience with hacking came through my mom. This was about 3 months ago. I got a text from my mom that she was getting emails about a ton of charges going through to her account. She was freaking out, to say the least. She was so confused about it because she didn't even know it was possible for someone to do. She started getting nervous that whoever was hacking her, might be able to get more of her information, such as her social security number or her address. Scary thoughts! I told her it was okay and I'm sure they just got her email from somewhere and the emails she was receiving was fake.

I asked her if she had done anything different the past few months and she only could name one thing - she had made a Facebook and Instagram account. Both of these accounts were made under the email address that was receiving all of these emails about her credit card being hacked.

Just thinking about my own experiences lead me to think about the safety of Facebook and other social media sites. How easy is it for someone to hack into the system and gain all of our personal information? I am sure I am not alone with these experiences. I am an ordinary girl from Illinois – how and why does this happen to me?