hack

A group of supporters of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange claimed responsibility today for hacking into and jamming several Swedish government Web sites, according to the Associated Press.

Initiating a denial-of-service attacks, the hacking group reportedly took down the Web sites of the Swedish government, armed forces, and the Swedish Institute for several hours.

According to the Associated Press, it isn't clear who was behind the attacks but an unidentified group announced responsibility on Twitter and told the Swedish government to take its "hands off Assange."

A second suspected member of the LulzSec hacker group has been arrested for his alleged role in a 2011 network security breach at Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Raynaldo Rivera, 20, of Tempe, Ariz., surrendered to authorities today in Phoenix, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a statement. An indictment unsealed today charged Rivera with conspiracy and unauthorized impairment of a protected computer. He faces 15 years in prison if convicted.

Cody Kretsinger, of Phoenix, was indicted last September in connection with the attack and has pleaded guilty, the FBI said.

Rivera, who is allegedly known by the monikers "neuron&… Read more

Do you have a cochlear implant? An intraocular lens in your eye? A prosethetic leg with microservos? You may not realize it, but you're standing on the front line of a new age of medical augmentation, one that's raising a host of complex questions.

Who owns the expensive implant that allows you to hear or see better or the sleek thin blades that let you sprint faster? How are upgrades to your device handled? What happens to you and your device if that company goes out of business? Do the answers change if the procedure is elective rather than life-saving?

No one has easy answers, or even much beyond informed speculation -- certainly not the doctors we spoke to for this article or the medical students who addressed medical augmentation at a Defcon 20 session last month in Las Vegas. But all agree on one thing: A new frontier of medical augmentation isn't just coming sooner than you think. It's already here, as society moves from medically necessary augmentation to elective procedures. Call it human hacking. … Read more

A Russian court Web site has been defaced following a verdict that saw the members of the all-female punk-rock band Pussy Riot sentenced to two years in jail.

The Khamovnichesky District Court was hacked today by a group claiming to be affiliated with the U.S. branch of Anonymous. The site uploaded a message in Russian saying that it doesn't "forget" or "forgive." The group also posted a Pussy Riot song, called "Putin Is Lighting the Fires of the Revolution," and video of Bulgarian singer Aziz.

The BBC was first to report on … Read more

Zappos, LinkedIn, eHarmony, Yahoo, LastFm, the Environmental Protection Agency, Stanford, and Columbia University -- all suffered online data breaches recently, says the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

In fact, this year alone, there have been 276 data breaches, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center. Statistics indicate that private sector businesses and the health-care industry were most vulnerable, falling victim to, respectively, 37 percent and 34 percent of the breaches. Educational institutions and the government/military sector had breach rates of 14 percent and 11 percent, respectively. The rate for financial companies came in at just more than 3 percent, according to … Read more

An anti-WikiLeaks hacking group has taken credit for launching a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against the Russian news site RT.com.

The organization, which calls itself Anti Leaks, today tweeted out to followers that it was "behind the DDoS attack on RT.com." Although the organization didn't explicitly say why it decided to attack RT, it included in its tweet a "#FreePussyRiot" hashtag.

The hashtag refers to the name of a Russian, all-female punk rock band. The band members were arrested in March after performing a "punk prayer" in Moscow's … Read more

Did you read Mat Honan's tale of woe last week? The one where his Amazon, Apple, Gmail, and Twitter accounts were hacked and his digital life was eradicated?

If not, I strongly encourage you to read his story. In a nutshell, hackers strung together pieces of information to gain access to several important online accounts. The results were personally devastating for him. But his story is a good lesson for all of us. After learning the details of the attack -- from one of the hackers himself, no less -- Honan says he regrets three things most of all.… Read more

Someone must have it out for Reuters. For the second time in two weeks, the blogging platform for the news source's Web site has been hacked into and false stories have been illicitly published.

Today's sham article reported that Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal had died, according to Reuters. The first bogus story, posted earlier this month, was about the rebel Free Syrian Army suffering setbacks in their battle against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

"Reuters did not report the false story and the post was immediately deleted," Reuters News' director of … Read more

Anonymous has promised to bring down its wrath on the Ukrainian government after authorities were said to have taken down the file-sharing site Demonoid last week.

"Last week, our generous green friend, the Demonoid, was met with a state sponsored Distributed Denial of Service attack...These illegal actions were then followed up with a raid by Ukraine authorities," the hacking group wrote in a blog post on AnonPR yesterday. "In retaliation for your criminal acts against us and the free flow of information, we have already begun an operation against those responsible. Lazers are already being fired.&… Read more