Hacker hacked 5,00,000 Facebook accounts

Sanford Wallace, 43, also known as "Spamford Wallace" and "David Frederix", was arrested in Las Vegas on Thursday.

Wallace is accused of hacking into 500,000 accounts to harvest friend lists between November 2008 and March 2009. He allegedly used the compromised lists to make more than 27 million unsolicited postings on Facebook walls that appeared to come from friends.

If targets clicked on links within the messages, they were presented with a website designed to fool them into handing over their full name, email address and password, prosecutors said. Finally they would be redirected to affiliate websites that would allegedly pay Wallace “substantial revenue” for traffic.

The scheme relied on vulnerabilities that Wallace discovered in Facebook’s spam filters, according to the indictment.
 

“To accomplish his scheme, Wallace first tested his spamming capabilities between two Facebook accounts,” it said.

“[He] used a fake Facebook account of ‘David Frederix’ and his legitimate ‘Sanford Masterwb Wallace’ account to test variations of spam messages in order to evade Facebook’s filtering mechanisms.
“Once Wallace evaded Facebook’s spam filters he employed an automatic scripting process to sign into a compromised Facebook user’s account, retrieve a list of all the user’s friends, and then post a spam message to each of the user’s friend’s Facebook walls.”
Wallace is now indicted on a total of 11 charges of fraud, intentional damage to a protected computer, and criminal contempt.
The contempt charges relate to an earlier civil case brought against Wallace by Facebook itself.
A federal judge awarded the dominant social network $711m in damages in October 2009. The firm did not expect Wallace to pay, but the judge also ordered him not to log in to Facebook. According to Thursday’s indictment he “wilfully and knowingly” breached that order.
Wallace, who first gained notoriety as a spammer in the 1990s and also lost a civil case brought against him by MySpace in 2008, was released on $100,000 bail. He faces up to three years in jail and a $250,000 fine for each of the six fraud charges and up to 10 years in jail for each of the three charges of intentional damage to a protected computer.
Facebook welcomed the arrest.
“We applaud the efforts of the US Attorney’s Office and the FBI to bring spammers to justice,” said Chris Sonderby, its lead security and investigation counsel.
“Two years ago, Facebook sued Wallace and a federal court ordered him to pay a $711 million judgment for sending unwanted messages and wall posts to people on Facebook. Now Wallace also faces serious jail time for this illegal conduct.”

BBC journalist narrates his encounter with UFO in England

 

London, August 04 (ANI): A BBC journalist has claimed that he has seen a UFO when he was just outside the Hertfordshire village of Cottered, England.

Sports reporter Mike Sewell told how he "totally freaked out" the moment he saw the disc-shaped craft zoom in front of his car as he drove across the countryside in darkness at 4.15am.

Sewell, who lives in the Midlands, was driving to Stansted Airport to catch a flight to Sweden for Champions League qualifying game between Malmo and Glasgow Rangers, when he saw a UFO with flashing lights in the road.

Sewell told how he had been driving behind a VW van when he saw the craft in the sky.

Speaking on Radio Five Live to millions of listeners, he revealed how he was left "gobsmacked" as the UFO then hovered above a field a few hundred yards from the road.

"I was driving east across country about 15 to 20 miles from Stansted Airport at 4.15 in the morning and I saw this big bright light in the sky descending towards the road and as it got closer it banked to the left," the Sun quoted him as saying.

"As it banked to the left it went cross-country, I could see underneath and it wasn't an aeroplane and it wasn't a helicopter.

"I dread saying this, disc-shaped. It had several lights flashing all around it and underneath there were at least two large panel lights, soft white lights underneath. And then it just sat or circled a certain area above a field."

"I was so gobsmacked. I was trying to keep on the road and eventually lost sight of it after two or three minutes but what I saw was not an normal aircraft. It was weird. I was totally freaked out," he added. (ANI)

NASA finds evidence of flowing water on Mars

This series of images shows warm-season features that might be evidence of salty liquid water active on Mars today. Evidence for that possible interpretation is presented in a report by McEwen et al. in the Aug. 5, 2011, edition of Science. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

This series of images shows warm-season features that might be evidence of salty liquid water active on Mars today. Evidence for that possible interpretation is presented in a report by McEwen et al. in the Aug. 5, 2011, edition of Science. These images come from observations of Newton crater, at 41.6 degrees south latitude, 202.3 degrees east longitude, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. In time, the series spans from early spring of one Mars year to mid-summer of the following year. The images taken from oblique angles have been adjusted so that all steps in the sequence show the scene as if viewed from directly overhead. The features that extend down the slope during warm seasons are called recurring slope lineae. They are narrow (one-half to five yards or meters wide), relatively dark markings on steep (25 to 40 degree) slopes at several southern hemisphere locations. Repeat imaging by HiRISE shows the features appear and incrementally grow during warm seasons and fade in cold seasons. They extend downslope from bedrock outcrops, often associated with small channels, and hundreds of them form in rare locations. They appear and lengthen in the southern spring and summer from 48 degrees to 32 degrees south latitudes favoring equator-facing slopes. These times and places have peak surface temperatures from about 10 degrees below zero Fahrenheit to 80 degree above zero Fahrenheit (about 250 to 300)

 

 An image combining orbital imagery with 3-D modeling shows flows that appear in spring and summer on a slope inside Mars' Newton crater. Sequences of observations recording the seasonal changes at this site and a few others with similar flows might be evidence of salty liquid water active on Mars today. Evidence for that possible interpretation is presented in a report by McEwen et al. in the Aug. 5, 2011, edition of Science. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona less