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Hackers launched a coordinated cyberattack on Israel over the weekend in an attempt to “wipe Israel off the map of the Internet,” defacing some 20,000 Israeli Facebook accounts and nearly 2,000 Israeli websites. The anarchist hacking collective known as Anonymous formally launched “Operation Israel” on Sunday, the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day. The stated goal of the attack was to wreak havoc on Israeli servers, government websites, and Internet users. The hackers penetrated and defaced multiple Israeli websites including government, schools, banks, and a website for children with cancer, according to regional media reports. Among the government websites breached were...

Anonymous continues to target North Korea with its latest round of exploits. Citing the threat posed by the North Korean government, the "hacktivist" group defaced the country's official Twitter and Flickr accounts yesterday. The North Korean Twitter feed now displays a series of tweets with links that poke fun at the country's leader Kim Jong-un. One linked image portrays Kim Jong-un in a less than flattering light and criticizes him for "threatening world peace with ICBMs and nuclear weapons" and "wasting money while his people starve." The country's Flickr account shows the same image as well as a graphic displaying...

President Obama has hit back at Beijing's alleged hacking campaign against U.S. businesses by banning government from buying Chinese computer technology. The new rule, which was buried in a spending bill signed this week, comes after a string of hacks traced back to China hit some of America's most important companies. It will only be in effect until the end of the fiscal year on September 30,

Pause and reflect on this hypocrisy: The Department of Justice prosecutes young hackers who use computers to promote free speech while highly educated adults within the DOJ threaten to use lethal drone force against American citizens without due process. Which is worse? Certainly, I do not condone hacking. However, you and I need to start talking about the best way to handle cyber-attacks while also recognizing that the same government officials we trust to protect us are assaulting our constitutional freedoms. Last month, cyber security firm Mandiant released an explosive, 76-page report indicating that the Chinese government is most likely...

Lords and Commons of England, consider what Nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governours: a Nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent, suttle and sinewy to discours, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to.* * *Those words were penned by John Milton in 1644, when he wrote, in “Areopagitica,” his plea for unlicensed printing. Where is the Mighty Milton now that England’s monarch, Elizabeth II, is getting set to establish by royal charter a new body, cooked up...

Devastating cellphone hacks that hijack your most personal gadget and rob you of privacy and money have long been forecast. But even as smartphone users in Asia are beginning to suffer exploding bills and emptied bank accounts at the hands of hackers, U.S. users largely remain safe and blissfully unaware of the gathering threat. Criminals have been probing the systems that protect U.S. smartphone users for years, searching for the right combination of programming tricks and social engineering that would allow them to sneak onto users' phones. They took a year-old mobile virus named NotCompatible, which allows hackers to take...

Cyberwar: A cybersecurity firm reports a secretive Chinese military unit is behind many recent "hack attacks" into U.S. computers, stealing trade and military secrets and developing a potentially crippling new weapon. In a 2009 editorial we noted that units of China's armed forces, whom we dubbed its "Cybertooth Tigers" were developing capabilities to penetrate and potentially disrupt U.S. computer systems as part of the People's Liberation Army's focus on what is known as "asymmetrical" warfare, specifically cyber-warfare. At least as far back as the 2008 edition of the Pentagon's annual report to Congress entitled "Military Power of the People's Republic...

For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees. After surreptitiously tracking the intruders to study their movements and help erect better defenses to block them, The Times and computer security experts have expelled the attackers and kept them from breaking back in. The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a Times investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business...

Hacktivist group Anonymous took control of the U.S. Sentencing Commission website Friday, January 25 in a new campaign called "Operation Last Resort." The first attack on the website was early Friday morning. The second - successful - attack came around 9pm PST that evening. anonymous By 3am PST ussc.gov was down (it has since been dropped from the DNS), yet as of this writing the IP address (66.153.19.162) still returns the defaced site's contents. It appears that via the U.S. government website, Anonymous had distributed encrypted government files and left a statement on the website that de-encryption keys would be...

Anonymous has hacked the US Sentencing Commission’s website in retaliation for the suicide of internet activist and Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz, and as of now, the site is still displaying in its compromised state.More on this breaking story as it develops. Statement below from Anonymous on the decision to hack USSC.gov. [Correction: An earlier version of this post stated that Anonymous' attack affected the Supreme Court's website, when in actuality, it is the US Sentencing Commission's website as stated above.]In addition to the defacing of the site with a video, a statement on Swartz’s death and the government’s alleged harassment of the activist...

As the health-care industry rushed onto the Internet in search of efficiencies and improved care in recent years, it has exposed a wide array of vulnerable hospital computers and medical devices to hacking, according to documents and interviews. Security researchers warn that intruders could exploit known gaps to steal patients’ records for use in identity theft schemes and even launch disruptive attacks that could shut down critical hospital systems. A year-long examination of cybersecurity by The Washington Post has found that health care is among the most vulnerable industries in the country, in part because it lags behind in addressing...

Viewers, beware: while you’re watching TV, your TV might be watching you back. A security firm discovered that Samsung’s Smart TV can give hackers access to the device’s built-in camera and microphones, allowing them to watch everything you do. The Malta-based firm ReVuln posted a video showing its team of researchers hacking into one of the Samsung TVs and accessing its settings, channel lists, widgets, USB drives, and remote control configurations. The security flaw allows hackers to access any and all personal data stored on the TV. “We can install malicious software to gain complete root access to the TV,”...

What do you need to rig an election? A basic knowledge of electronics and $30 worth of RadioShack gear, professional hacker Roger Johnston reveals. The good news: we can stop it.Roger Johnston is the head of the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory. Not long ago, he and his colleagues launched security attacks on electronic voting machines to demonstrate the startling ease with which one can steal votes. Even more startling: Versions of those machines will appear in polling places all over America on Tuesday. The touchscreen Diebold Accuvote-TSX will be used by more than 26 million voters in...

Mitt Romney's Republican Get Out the Vote system (ORCA) had a meltdown on Election Day leaving some campaign workers wandering around with nothing to do. Now Anonymous has released a video claiming responsibility for jamming ORCA...

• Amanda Todd, 15, killed herself on October 10, just five weeks after she detailed her treatment by cyber bullies in emotional YouTube video • Man 'blackmailed teenage girls on the internet and used "jailbait" websites' • Sparks concerns over hacking group's power to create 'trial by internet' • Police investigation underway and they are 'aware' of the claims

The City of Burlington is struggling after someone stole $487,000 from the city's $4 million general fund at Bank of America. "We really don't know exactly how it happened," said City Manager Bryan Harrison. "Multiple banks in multiple states involved."

"Entire cities in the World of Warcraft have been destroyed with no one spared, not even the NPCs. About 13:00 GMT, forums on WOW started getting the first comments from users regarding players and NPCs dying on the Ragnaros-EU realm in Orgrimmar. Users of the online game started reporting that Draenor had a similar sight to offer. Some of the other realms where this was reported include Tarren Mill, and Twisting Nether." Also at Joystiq, and (with more screenshots) at WCCF Tech, which reports that "it appears the damage is most severe in World of Warcraft European servers."

Bill Gertz has the grim news in the Washington Free Beacon: Hackers linked to China's government broke into one of the U.S. government's most sensitive computer networks, breaching a system used by the White House Military Office for nuclear commands, according to defense and intelligence officials familiar with the incident. One official said the cyber breach was one of Beijing's most brazen cyber attacks against the United States and highlights a failure of the Obama administration to press China on its persistent cyber attacks. Disclosure of the cyber attack also comes amid heightened tensions in Asia, as the Pentagon moved...

An anonymous hacking group claims to have stolen Mitt Romney's tax returns from financial services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC). PWC denies that there has been any unauthorized access to Mitt Romney or wife Ann's tax information and that any of their systems have been breached. The hacking group sent thumb drives that supposedly contained copies of the returns to the Democratic and Republican county offices in Nashville Tennessee, as well as PWC. The Nashville city paper was among the first to report on the hacking incident. The group announced their demands on Pastebin, a tool that is used by coders to...

An anonymous individual or group claims to have obtained "all available" tax returns associated with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The alleged hackers claim to have accessed them via computers in the Franklin, Tenn., office of professional services firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers. An anonymous posting on a file sharing website claims PwC was hacked; the same site has been used to boast of other high-profile corporate hacks. How'd they pull it off, allegedly? The posting states: "[Romney's tax returns] were taken from the PWC office 8/25/2012 by gaining access to the third floor via a gentleman working on the 3rd floor of...