International phone hacking scandal

Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive officer of News Corporation, the parent company of News International

The News International phone-hacking scandal — dubbed "Hackgate", "Rupertgate", or "Murdochgate" by the press — is an ongoing controversy involving the defunct News of the World and other British newspapers published by News International, a subsidiary of News Corporation. Employees of the newspaper were accused of engaging in phone hacking, police bribery, and exercising improper influence in the pursuit of publishing stories. Investigations conducted from 2005–2007 concluded that the paper's phone hacking activities were limited to celebrities, politicians and members of the British Royal Family. In July 2011, it was revealed that the phones of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, relatives of deceased British soldiers, and victims of the 7/7 London bombingswere also accessed, resulting in a public outcry against News Corporation and owner Rupert Murdoch. Advertiser boycotts contributed to the closure of the News of the World on 10 July, ending 168 years of publication.^[1] Continued public pressure later forced News Corporation to cancel its proposed takeover of the British telecommunications company BSkyB.

British prime minister David Cameron announced on 6 July 2011, that a public inquiry would look into the affair after police investigations had ended. On 13 July 2011, Cameron named Lord Justice Leveson as chairman of the inquiry, with a remit to look into phone hacking and police bribery by the News of the World, while a separate inquiry would consider the culture and ethics of the wider British media.^[2] He also said the Press Complaints Commission would be replaced "entirely".^[1] The inquiries led to several high-profile resignations, including Dow Jones chief executive Les Hinton; News International legal manager Tom Crone; and chief executive Rebekah Brooks. The commissioner of London's Metropolitan Police Service, Sir Paul Stephenson, also resigned his post. Former News of the World managing editor Andy Coulson, former executive editor Neil Wallis, and Brooks were all arrested. Murdoch and his son, James, were summoned to give evidence before the Leveson Inquiry.

The negative attention garnered by the scandal eventually reached the United States, where News Corporation is headquartered and operates multiple media outlets. The Federal Bureau of Investigation launched a probe on 14 July 2011, to determine whether News Corporation accessed voicemails of victims of the9/11 attacks. On 15 July, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced an additional investigation by the Department of Justice, looking into whether the company had violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Over the course of his testimony before the Leveson Inquiry, Rupert Murdoch admitted that a cover-up had taken place within the News of the World to hide the scope of the phone hacking.^[3] On 1 May 2012, a parliamentary select committee released a report concluding that Murdoch "exhibited wilful blindness to what was going on in his companies and publications," and stated that he was "not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company."^[4]

Shut Down Your PC by SMS

This is my favourite secret mobile phone tricks out of the list. When you have everything set up, you’ll be able to send a text message with a chosen keyword such as “˜shutdown’ to your PC. This then activates the shutdown procedure. Here’s how it works.

First, you create an easy text file with a one line command (this is specified in the video) and save it to your hard drive. Then, you set up a Kwiry account and sync it with your Email account which you have set up in Outlook Express.

A rule must then be created in Outlook Express which will detect any incoming emails with that keyword and then execute the shutdown command in the text file when it does.

By sending a text with the keyword to your Kwiry account, an identical email is sent to your own email account, thus you can shut down your PC via SMS when you’re out and about.

It’s best to choose an obscure word so a normal email doesn’t accidentally shut down your PC.

You could also use this for cueing up a video game or a program which takes a long time to load before you actually get home to your PC by choosing another application besides from the shutdown file when creating a rule.

Just a quick word of warning before I sign off: many of the claimed cell phone hacks on the internet are completely fake. When researching this article (and through some SPAM a few years back) I came across lots of bogus guides which either waste your time or potentially mess up your phone. So watch out!

lack hat or White hat! Computer Hacking ExplainedA Brief History

One might not suspect that the art, or scourge, of computer hacking was created at one of the havens for technological excellence. True, at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), a group of students developed the technique and borrowed their name from the "hackers" of the late 1800s who found amusement in pranking the emerging telephone companies.

 cracking into primitive computers and exploiting the Arpanet (preGetting their laughs and skills from hacking anddecessor to the internet), they created a novelty that would become the target of federal crackdown in years to come. To define hacking in short, we can say that an artistic criminal offense of breaking into another remote system without the owner's consent for the purpose of stealing information is what is hacking. 

However, the act of hacking started out innocently, and was basically a method of trying to figure out how computer systems worked. The 1970s saw the rise in "phreaking," or phone hacking, headed by John Draper. This method allowed the user of a "blue box,", when used with a Captain Crunch whistle of 2600 hertz which accessed the AT&T long distance system, to make free long distance calls. Hackers initiated with accessing the free phone calls through a varied range of sources, thereby managing to circumvent into the nation's radio system and the phoning system resulting in a tremendous phone fraud nationwide.

After the age of "phreaking," computers became not only the target, but also the forum, for a growing hacker population to communicate. The creation of bulletin board systems (BBS) allowed this communication and the technological possibility of more serious government and credit card hacking became possible. At this time in the early 80's, hacking groups such as the Legion of Doom began to emerge in the United States, giving organization, and thus more power to hackers across the country.

Once this happened, breaking into the computers became a legitimate activity, with its own groups and soon its own voice with the 2600 magazine, launched in 1984. The effects of computer hacking were serious. Two years later, inevitably, Congress launched the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that outlawed hacking. Over the years, there was a series of noticeable occurrences as the worst consequential effect of computer hacking on more high profile cases, such as the Morris Worm, responsible for infecting government and university systems, and the Mitnick case in 1995, which captured Kevin Mitnick, steeling as many as 20000 credit card numbers.

In 1999, security software became widely known by the public, and with the release of new Windows programs, which were littered with security weaknesses, they became successful because of necessity. This fraudulent act of computer hacking is perhaps the major problem, confronting the rapidly expanding population of Internet users today, with the systems still trying to battle online hackers. It is recommended to protect with updated antispyware software to improve your PC performance.

Hacking tips

Following are the tips to keep off hacker’s interruption.
1.The password you use for each account should be unique. Even if someone manages to find your password of a particular account, you could limit the damages to that account alone.
2.Never use wireless technologies like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi in Public Areas,
3.Try to avoid usage of wireless networks and turn off your Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices. Use wired network only with managed extensive firewall software. For example you can put to use the best firewall to protect your 256 GB Asus laptop to keep off hacker attacks.
4.To avoid dictionary attacks and brute force attack, be sure to use complex passwords that are combination of letters, numbers and special characters, and must be more than 10 characters long.
5.Never use others’ system to log into your accounts, beware of the software like keylogger, abel, etc.
6.When using others system, be sure to download Spybot software to see if there are any security holes and then begin using their system.
7.You password must be changed frequently and periodically.
8.Check your antivirus for frequent updated for virus threats, malware removal, adware removal and prevention.
In order to stay safe against hacking, you must know the way hacking works. You can browse the internet for hacking guides, hacking software, hacking methods and do some academic research on those topics. Hackers usually use malware to attack the system and create paths for them to enter and steal the valuable information stored on the systems. A lot of expert hackers write their own software and use their own technique to perform hacking, and thus making it tough for us tracks them down. All you can do is follow the above guidelines and make use effective security related application programs like antivirus (Norton, McAfee, etc), Spyware (STOPzilla Spyware remover), etc and stay protected against malware

Type of hackings

 – Combination of both the above. They make use of legal access to steal unauthorized data.
Blue hat
 – Delegating authority to a third person to check for bugs in your own system. 
Elite
 – Expert hackers are referred as Elite hackers. 
Script kiddie
– Amateur hacker who uses others ideas and software for hacking.
Neophyte
 – Almost new to internet fundamentals. 
Hacktivism
 – Spreading their beliefs in the form of message via the hacked system to others.
Phreaker
 – Telecomm hacker who tricks plays with the telephone and making you do free ISD calls.
Computer Security Hacker
 – hacker knowing the tech spec of computer security and networking. Using fragmented packets to attack the firewall or ISP.
Academic Hacker
 – Academic person doing a research about hacking.
Hobby Hacker
 – Hacking done as a hobby like jail breaking done on Apple iPhones, modifying software and hardware, etc.

Set Multiple Home Pages In Firefox

you can easily do it without using any third party addon.

Suppose you would like to set Orkut, Google and hackingtips.in as your homepages. Then try this tweak in Firefox to set multiple homepages. It can be done as:

• Goto Tools>Options>Main

• In the When Firefox starts drop down menu choose Show my home page

• In Home page give your homepages separated by a | (pipe symbol)

Example: http://www.google.com|http://www.orkut.com|http://techian.com

• Click OK

Now next time when you start Firefox all of your three home pages will be displayed simultaneously.

speed up your internet connection using firefox

1. Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll
down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time.
When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really
speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This
means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer.
Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0?.
This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it recieves.

If you’re using a brodband connection you’ll load pages 2-3 times faster now