Hackers, Cyber Attack | featured news

Citigroup Inc said a cyber attack in May affected over 360,000 of its customers, or almost twice the initial number that the bank's figures had suggested. After a week of being pressured over its delayed disclosure of the data breach, the third largest U.S. bank by assets revealed more details in a statement late on Wednesday.

Spanish police arrested three suspected members of the so-called "Anonymous" group on Friday on charges of cyber-attacks against targets including Sony's PlayStation network, governments, businesses and banks.

Their cyber attacks on governments and corporations have seen the loose collective of hackers known only as “Anonymous” pass from obscurity to becoming the byword for online guerrilla warfare. Nevertheless, the group has remained an enigma.

For three pennies an hour, hackers can rent Amazon.com Inc.’s servers to wage cyber attacks such as the one that crippled Sony Corp.’s PlayStation Network and led to the second-largest online data breach in U.S. history. A hacker used Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud, or EC2, service to attack Sony’s online entertainment systems last month, a person with knowledge of the matter said May 13. The intruder, who used a bogus name to set up an account that’s now disabled, didn’t hack into Amazon’s servers, the person said.

British police arrested five young men on Thursday as they and U.S. authorities conducted searches as part of a probe into Internet activists who carried out cyber attacks against groups they viewed as enemies of the WikiLeaks website.

Gawker Media Inc. is urging subscribers to change their passwords because hackers have found their way into the company's user databases.

The European websites of the online retailer Amazon go temporarily offline, amid ongoing threats against major sites by pro-Wikileak activists.

As hacktivists target Amazon.com, a book has found its way onto the online commerce site that contains the U.S. documents released by WikiLeaks.

Both Facebook and Twitter have closed accounts corresponding to Anonymous, a formerly 4chan-linked group organizing a string of DDoS attacks on organizations that refuse to work with WikiLeaks.

A computer hacker who calls himself the Jester claimed responsibility for the cyber attack which took down the WikiLeaks site Sunday, shortly before it started posting hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic cables.