contributed by Mountain King
Two brothers who broke into a bank computer in China earlier this year and stole 260,000 yuan, have been sentenced to death by a court in eastern China.

CNN

contributed by Anonymous
Phrack magazine, one of the oldest hacking ezines in existence has finally released its 54 issue. Volume 8 issue 54 has articles dealing with buffer overflows, Tadiran systems and even a chocolate chip cookie recipe, (Great for social engineering).

Phrack

contributed by Weld Pond
THC-SCAN v2.0 has been released, and it claims to be better than Toneloc. The war dialer or telephone scanner has the capability to run on any DOS emulating operating system. It claims ODBC support, the ability to identify VMBs and unused numbers automatically, scan numbers specified in a text file, auto detect 8N1, 7E1 and 7O1 carrier modes, and you get the source code all for FREE. It just may be better.

THC-SCAN v2.0

contributed by Informant-.X
SoS (Sons Of Satan/Saviors Of Systems), a South African hacking group, has released f0rbidden knowledge issue one. This ezine has articles on Vodacom voice mail hacking and how to access administrative functions on NedBank ATM machines.

f0rbidden knowledge issue one

contributed by Space Rogue
Russia is a potential breeding ground for high tech criminals. The economic crisis in Russia is forcing many talented hackers to become crackers in order to earn a living. Work is scarce for computer experts and many are turning to piracy and cracking for hire.

Nando Times

contributed by Space Rogue
The National Bureau of Investigation of the Philippines is attempting to increase convictions for those people involved with Internet crime.

AsiaBizTech

contributed by Space Rogue
The National Police Department in Japan is setting aside 1.95 billion Yen to create 13 special investigation teams to fight various online crime and two other teams to fight online terrorism.

Nando Times

contributed by Anonymous
Xmas hax0r 98
Xmas hax0r 98, an event sponsored by a German cracking group, claims to have cracked over 150 web sites in the last few days. Most sites where of the .ch, .de, and .at top level domains.
Xmas hax0r 98

Hi-Tech Hate
We received an email from "Hi-Tech Hate - We wont accept social suppression" claiming to have cracked about 75 web sites. They replaced the main page of most of the sites with this one.
HNN Archive of cracked page

#rootworm
#rootworm on undernet claimed to have cracked the following sites over the weekend.
http://primewave.net
http://www.hays.co.uk/
http://www.haysnewmedia.co.uk/

AntiOnline Cracked?
Last Thursday morning HNN posted the follwowing email that we recieved from someone calling themselves "I0StrEAM":
"My b0iiz and mahself took down www.antionline.com today with a multitude of DoS attacks and pretty much Pearl Harbor of JP's homefront. Tack the name Chaosklan to it's removal."
We where unable to confirm the above statements. AntiOnline was down and we had no way of getting in touch with them to confirm the accusation. We felt it was important enough to post on our site even without confirmation. We did warn that it was unconfirmed and even posted it down here in the "Rumours from the Underground" section.
It seems that AntiOnline did not appreciate the fact that this information was posted at all. They actually seemed rather upset about about the whole deal. AntiOnline has claimed that the reason they went down (and are still down 5 days later) was due to a hard drive crash. We are glad that no harm has come to AnitOnlines servers and hope that they are back online soon.

HNN archive for December 24, 1998
www.antionline.com

Evidently we where not the only ones who where slightly upset with AntiOnlines comments regarding the alleged crack of thier site. 100% Pure Bikkel, a HNN Affiliate, has posted a rather amusing parady of AntiOnlines comments written by Iron-Lungs.

AntiOnline Parody