Kelly Jackson Higgins from DarkReading has assembled an examination of six "cool" hacks from 2010.
The list has a little of everything from the ethical to the not so ethical of hackers, many made headlines, and some are little known outside the world of hardcore tech-heads.
A summary of Jackson's ensemble are as follows:
- Barnaby Jack's ATM Jackpot: Barnaby Jack performed on stage at the Black Hat USA conference this summer. Jack demonstrated how using vulnerabilities he had discovered in certain ATM machines could literally pay off...
- Intercepting GSM Phone Calls: Chris Paget crafted by hand his own GSM base station running over ham-radio frequency and brought his so-called "IMSI Catcher" to Defcon18 this year. During a live demonstration Paget, a security researcher, successfully fooled several attendees' cell phones into connecting to his phony GSM base station...
- Hacking The Attacker: Andrzej Dereszowski came up with a proof-of-concept that wages a counterattack merely by finding vulnerabilities in the attacker's malware -- and then using those flaws against him...
- Average Joes Now Can Be Hackers, Too: A new tool unleashed in October by Eric Butler has now made it possible for the average Joe to hijack a WiFi user's Facebook, Twitter, or other unsecured account session while drinking a cup of Joe...
- Yet Another Form Of XSS: You know reflected, persistent, and DOM-based XSS attacks. Now there's another form of XSS attack that's especially tough to detect called Meta-Information XSS, or miXSS, which exploits commonly used network administration utilities...
- 'Samy' Is Baaaack, And He Knows Where You Live: Remember the infamous 'Samy' worm that spread via MySpace in 2005 and infected some 1 million users within 20 hours? Samy Kamkar, who wrote a worm to make "friends" on MySpace, has re-emerged and came up with a hack this year detects where you live based on your home router...