According to the wall street journal Insurgents in Iraq have hacked the predator drones being used there and in afganistan to intercept the video feed of where they are. The best part about this hack: they achieved it using $26 off the shelf software. From the article:

Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes' systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber -- available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet -- to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.
U.S. officials say there is no evidence that militants were able to take control of the drones or otherwise interfere with their flights. Still, the intercepts could give America's enemies battlefield advantages by removing the element of surprise from certain missions and making it easier for insurgents to determine which roads and buildings are under U.S. surveillance.

Somehow, I doubt they actually paid for the software.

Repost @zone-h:

Since Zone-H started its mirroring activity of defacements, it always witnessed any sort of hacktivism. Sure, most of the times defacers are/were/will be just defacing *just for the pleasure of it* but when it comes the time of big protests related to world's events, we are used to see both regular defacers or improvized cyber protesters taking a stand and spell out their disappointments by posting something using the defacement media.

Because... yes.... defacement is a media, it has been proven in several occasion that by defacing just one well targeted website, defacers were capable to attract the attention of regular medias which were reporting his message to the world.

Today, I was reading the news related to the clashes happening right now after the results of the Iranian political election which has been won by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with a percentage that usually belongs only to countries ruled by a strong dictatorship and that any sort of statistical analysis would label at least as an *anomaly*.

But what happened in the cyber-world? Did we witness any sort of digital protest as we used to see in the past like those related to the Kashmir dispute? Or something like the Estonian bronze statue protest? Or even the Prophet Mohammed cartoon protest?

So this morning I woke up with the wish to check the on-hold mirrors to see if some voices were raising in the cyber world....

... with zero results.

Surprisingly (or not?) the voice of cyber-protesters is still focused on:

wishes of death to Israel, Usa and Denmark (still, after 3 years!):

http://www.zone-h.org/mirror/id/9015037

Armenian and Azerbaijan rants:

http://www.zone-h.org/mirror/id/9014522

Turkish hackers against Israel:

http://www.zone-h.org/mirror/id/9014492

Turkish hackers against Armenians:

http://www.zone-h.org/mirror/id/9014487

wishes against Israel:

http://www.zone-h.org/mirror/id/9014463

wishes of a free Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine while showing the finger to USA and Israel

http://www.zone-h.org/mirror/id/9014447

whishes of a Kosovo independency:

http://www.zone-h.org/mirror/id/9014961

and absolutely nothing, zero related to the recent Iranian happenings.

Yet another statistical anomaly?

UPDATE:

I received a message from an Iranian defacer. He says that he indeed protested during the election days

http://www.zone-h.org/mirror/id/8982062
http://www.zone-h.org/mirror/id/8982059

I didn't notice it as... I don't speak Farsi language.

The most recent issue of Hack This Zine has just been released. If you
want to grab a paper copy, you can do so at the upcoming Portland
Anarchist Bookfair, print one yourself, or order one from Oly Hackbloc.

Hack This Zine is a zine about hacking, electronic civil disobedience,
computer culture, and computer security. Overall, it's bad-ass and you
should read it.

Grab it at https://hackbloc.org/zine

Get off the internet, we'll see you in the streets

On tuesday, February 9th, German hacktivists took over the website of the German interior minister,  Wolfgang Schäuble,  in a protest against new German wiretapping and data retention laws.  They replaced the site with links to a protest site: http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/.  The site was hacked by using a dictionary attack against the typo3 cms the website was using the password turned out to be 'gewinner' or 'winner' in english.  The hack only lasted a couple hours before it was taken down, though the website remained unaccessible for wednesday. 

Some of you may remember that the Chaos Computer Club hacked Wolfgang Schäuble last year by putting his fingerprints online in a protest against the use of biometrics in passports. 

As you probably already know this time waging a ground war on the country, but there are counterattacks going on.  Turkish hackers took over several prominent Israeli sites turning them into an anti war message.  From the article on IMEMC.org:

"The main page of the Ynet News was replaced by a black page which included four pictures; the first picture included a large number of bodies of Palestinians or Lebanese who were killed in Israeli offensives, the second pictures was of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, all forced nude and forced over each other, the third picture was an image of an Israeli religious man carrying a poster which reads Ending Zionism

= Peace, and the fourth picture was the historic map of Palestine which has several images of illegal land grab and annexation by Israeli through different historical periods.
The hackers also played a song about Gaza in the background. The website was fixed several hours later and the Ynet News managed to gain control over it again.
Furthermore, the hackers also controlled an Israeli Weather Forecast website.

It was revealed later on that the hackers are from Turkey and that they hacked into the websites in retaliation to the ongoing Israeli attacks against the Gaza Strip.
They left messages in Turkish and English stating 'You will be cursed in the electronic world', and other messages such as 'to the Palestinian people, your Muslim brothers salute you… be patient…we in Turkey support you..' ”

Read more here: http://www.imemc.org/article/58292

Found this post on indymedia today, thought I would pass it along, purely for informational purposes:

It’s time for round two!!! This Monday, December 22, please set your browser to puppykillers123.blackapplehost.com and follow the directions on the screen. This past Monday if you checked the site: http://www.rmsbg.com/ you would have noticed that the site was “down for maintenance.” Something that we have never seen before on the site. So, chances are, our action worked!!! Let’s bring them down again this coming Monday. This action will only if enough people are following the directions on puppykillers123.blackapplehost.com so please get as many people to load that site and keep the browser open as long as you can!!! For more information on HLS, visit insidehls.com.

NOTE: This action is not affiliated in any way with hackbloc and should not be construed as such.  This post is informational only.

Moral outrage brimmed over the edge of the news day when television pundits finally began reporting that Sarah Palin's private Yahoo account had been hacked by the shadowy "Anonymous," an internet hacktivist group organized much like the Animal Liberation Front, utlizing leaderless resistance in which the lack of a visible hierarchal structure is replaced by like-minded individuals contributing to the group autonomously to avoid detection by authorities.

Anonymous is popular for its ongoing campaign against the Church of Scientology. In what first appeared to be a joke with its introduction to the mainstream through a cheeky youtube video, the group quickly went on to attack and expose an organization accused of fraud, murder, and censorship. Utilizing typical hacktivist strategies such as denial-of-service attacks, digg.com bumping of articles critical of Scientology, google bombing, and baiting suspected pedophiles, the group is special for going a step further from typical hacktivists and enjoys the activities of traditional activists: masked direct actions throughout the world, sometimes attracting as many as 300 participants, as well as leaking hacked materials to the mainstream media, such as the Tom Cruise Scientology video.

The hacker who broke into Sarah Palin's, the Republican Governor of Alaska, e-mail came forward the other day and told how he preformed the hack. He used a simple google search to find information to answer the "Security" question that yahoo askes for a missing password. By looking up where Palin had met her spouse he was able to answer the question and reset the password. The account had nothing interesting and included just pictures of her family and no information that would help derail her campaign.

The group who has been attacking the cult of scientology for some time has now broken into Sarah Palins yahoo e-mail account. Copies of the e-mails were posted to WikiLeaks and can be found here WikiLeaks Sarah Palin's e-mail. It is not anything too interesting still it is pretty funny though.

Here are a few links to more information:

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/09/group-posts-e-m.html

http://gawker.com/5051193/sarah-palins-personal-email-account-hacked