Internet, Hacking | featured news

Chinese hackers repeatedly penetrated The New York Times' computer systems over the past four months, stealing reporters' passwords and hunting for files on an investigation into the wealth amassed by the family of a top Chinese leader, the newspaper reported Thursday....

The Department of Homeland Security says despite some fixes to Java, it continues to recommend users disable the program in their Web browsers, because it remains vulnerable to attacks that could result in identity theft and other cyber crimes.

An Internet blackout and complete lack of phone service has not stopped the infamous international hacker group Anonymous from its cyberwar on the Syrian regime. The hacker group, which has been credited with online attacks on governments, international banks and even the CIA, claims it is retaliating against the embattled regime of Bashar al-Assad, which it believes had shut down online and cellphone access this week, perhaps in preparation for a major offensive.

At the University of Tulsa school, students learn to write computer viruses, hack digital networks and mine data from broken cellphones. Many graduates head to the CIA or NSA.

Several NBC websites were hacked on Sunday by a person or group calling itself "pyknic" and suggesting a possible link to the cyber-attack group Anonymous.

Thomson Reuters said its blogging platform for Reuters News was hacked, resulting in multiple false posts to its website, including a fake interview with a Syrian rebel army leader.

LinkedIn confirmed Wednesday afternoon via its blog that user passwords had been compromised and eHarmony said the same thing.

A Russian hacker claims to have uploaded almost 6.5 million LinkedIn passwords, The Verge reports. LinkedIn in says in a tweet that "Our team is currently looking into reports of stolen passwords. Stay tuned for more."

When Mark Zuckerberg wrote about creating a hacker-friendly company in the letter attached to Facebook’s IPO filing last year, he meant it–in more ways that one. Facebook has paid out more than $300,000 to hackers that reveal bugs in the site and help to fix them, according to Ryan McGeehan, the head of Facebook’s security response team. In a post to questions-and-answers site Quora earlier this month, McGeehan wrote that the company’s bug bounty program, which typically pays hackers around $1,000 for each vulnerability they disclose to Facebook’s security team, has paid out rewards to 131 researchers in 27 countries since it launched in July of last year, and has even hired one of those hackers as a summer intern.

Mark Zuckerberg was not kidding about Facebook’s hacker culture. The night before the chartbusting initial public stock offering, engineers won’t be counting their Facebook dollars. They’ll be doing what they have always done: Hack. Facebook will pull an all-night hackathon that will end when Zuckerberg rings the Nasdaq’s opening bell from Facebook’s Menlo Park campus.