Target Hack: The Movie...coming soon to a theater near you.

Does the computer breach at Target have the makings of a movie? Throw in a shotgun-toting security analyst, Russian hackers, drugs and a SWAT team and Hollywood appears to think so.

Sony has bought the rights to a New York Times article about Brian Krebs, the security blogger who was the first to expose December's security breach at Target.

The article, "Reporting From the Web's Underbelly," was written by Nicole Perlroth and details how Krebs' blog about cybercrime has prompted criminals to hack him repeatedly, send heroin and excrement to his home and falsely accuse him of murder.

"A lot of what Brian does would scare the hell out of traditional newsroom editors," Russ Walker, Krebs's former editor at The Washington Post, said in the Times article. "I don't think he crossed the lines journalistically, but he was living a different type of experience."

The movie is expected to be a cyberthriller written by Richard Wenk, whose credits include "16 Blocks," "The Mechanic" and "The Expendables 2."

Krebs himself seems amused by the notion that his life and unglamorous work may soon be dramatized by Hollywood.

"Judging from accounts of the screenwriter's other movies, if this flick actually gets made someone vaguely resembling me probably will be kicking some badguy butt on the Silver Screen," he wrote Friday in a post on his security blog.

"I still have yet to work out the details with Sony, but beyond remuneration, I would be delighted if I could influence the selection of the leading man," he added.

"In the past week, I've been told I look like both Jim Carrey and Guy Pierce, but I'm not so sure. But if I had to pick one of my favorite actors, I'd love to see Edward Norton in the role."

As many as 40 million customers had their personal information compromised in the Target breach. Krebs found out about it through sources in the hacker underworld and was the first to contact Target about it.

Source: CNN

New York Times hit with malicious attack.

A tweet from the official Times Twitter account was directing readers to an alternative website, news.nytco.com, if they were having difficulties accessing the main site at nytimes.com. Readers in Europe and Asia were reporting problems Wednesday.

Marc Frons, chief information officer at the Times, told employees Tuesday that the outage was the result of an attack on Melbourne IT, the company's domain name registrar, according to the New York Times.

Frons told the Times that the hacktivist group Syrian Electronic Army was responsible for the attack, "or someone trying very hard to be them." The Syrian Electronic Army is a group of hackers aligned with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The group sent a tweet claiming responsibility for the Times attack, and SEA also claimed that it took over Twitter's own domain on Tuesday afternoon.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has begun looking into the website disruption, a law enforcement official told CNN. The "preliminary inquiry" is still in its early stages, the official said.
The Times did not reply to a request for comment.

Two weeks ago, Syrian Electronic Army claimed responsibility for hacking Outbrain, a news recommendation engine that appears on websites including The Washington Post, CNN and Time. The hacked news links were redirecting to a site controlled by the hacking group, which supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and has taken credit for several recent cyberattacks.

The New York Times' own website had suffered an outage the day before the Outbrain hack, prompting speculation that hackers were responsible, but a spokeswoman for the paper said that outage was the result of complications associated with a scheduled maintenance update.

Source: New York Time