hacking
Culture
Make Your Own Modded Console Handhelds
10:30PM Luke Plunkett | Console modder Ben Heckendorn has made quite a name for himself chopping machines apart and making them smaller, sleeker, more portable. Now you can do as he does. More »
News
3:00PM David Wildgoose | The website of Australia’s Classification Board has been hacked. Visitors to the site overnight were greeted with the above message.
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Classification Board Website Hacked
3:00PM David Wildgoose | The website of Australia’s Classification Board has been hacked. Visitors to the site overnight were greeted with the above message.
More »
News
Famed Hacker Cut His Teeth On…Lucasarts’ X-Wing
6:00PM Luke Plunkett | Virgil Griffith is a hacker. You might not know him by name, but you may well know him by deed, he’s the guy behind WikiScanner, the tool that lets you find out who’s been tinkering with Wikipedia entries. His background in exploiting security systems could see him labelled a hacker. He prefers the term “disruptive technologist”. Either way, the guy had one hell of an education, as he got his start playing around with code with a game that’s very dear to my heart: I remember in particular there was a ‘Star Wars’ game, X-Wing…Only one of my computer-controlled wingmen was any good. My very first hack at age 9 was noticing there was a file for each pilot, and I simply copied the pilot file for the good wingman 20 times, giving me a plentiful supply of the best wingmen from then on. More »
Pirated NTSC GTA IV Leaked Online Early
5:30PM Luke Plunkett | 48 hours? You’re not giving yourselves enough credit. Less than a day after the PAL copy of the game was leaked, NTSC copies of Grand Theft Auto IV have begun popping up on torrent sites, courtesy of a group calling themselves 101. We’re still unable to verify whether this is the real thing or not, but regardless, the files are already pushing 20,000 leechers. Shame. We’re still waiting on Rockstar for comment. More »Hackers, Go Buy A PS3
2:00PM Logan Booker | Nick Breese, a Kiwi researcher, believes the PS3 could be the next great (and affordable) hacking tool, according to a story over at The Sydney Morning Herald.
We all know the Synergistic Processing Units, or SPUs, in the Playstation 3’s Cell processor are capable chunks of hardware. Although the Cell chip in the PS3 has only six of its eight SPUs accessible (one is locked to improve yields, and the other handles console security), that’s still a respectable amount of grunt. 14 Tony units, to be exact.
While Nick is confident this power is more than enough to brute-force simple eight-character passwords, he says your bank account’s 128-bit SSL will give it a lot of trouble.
From the article:
The gaming console is perfect for cracking passwords because the chips it uses are optimised to rapidly perform the calculations required to model 3-D environments. The computing techniques used to crack passwords are similar.
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