hack

WordPress warned its users on the blog: “Earlier today the WordPress team noticed suspicious commits to several popular plugins (AddThis, WPtouch, and W3 Total Cache) containing cleverly disguised backdoors. We determined the commits were not from the authors, rolled them back, pushed updates to the plugins, and shut down access to the plugin repository while we looked for anything else unsavory.”

A 19-year old man was arrested by British police on suspicion that the was linked to the cyber group Lulz Security behind cyber attacks on CIA and Sony Corp. London's Metropolitan Police, working with the U.S. FBI, said they arrested the teenager in the town of Wickford, close to London.

The investigation was launched and the raid was arranged in relation to recent attacks on the websites of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the British police Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), which targets organized crime in Britain and overseas, police said.

On Wednesday Australian government announced the legislation to prosecute cybercrime in view of a recent storm of attacks on multinational companies and institutions including governmental websites across the globe.

Attorney-General Robert McClelland said that cybercrime was a growing threat to individuals, businesses and governments with the country's giant resource industry having warned recently of near-daily hacking attempts from offshore.

This week Citigroup Inc reported new figures of how may users had been affected by the May data breach. The company said that it affected over 360,000 of its customers, or almost twice the initial number.

Citi has been pressed by regulators to disclose the details of data breach. On Wednesday the company provided more information.

The breach, which Citigroup first made public on June 8, was initially detected on May 10.

A total of 360,083 North American Citigroup credit card accounts were affected by the breach, the bank said.

A user of Bitcoin open-source virtual currency project claimed that his 25,000 Bitcoins, technically valued at close to $500,000, had mysteriously been transferred to an unknown user's account. Owners of the project cannot verify or disclaim these allegations.

Allinvain speculated the thieves made off with the windfall after using malware to compromise his Windows-based computer.

"I just woke up to see a very large chunk of my bitcoin balance gone," the user wrote. "I feel like killing myself now."

A severe cyberattack hit the servers of the International Monetary Fund. The fund has admitted to being a victim of hackers’ hijacking. After the report the World Bank decided to temporally cut all computer connections between the two institutions.

It was not revealed what the nature of the attack was. The IMF staff was told of the hack last week in an email. However, it is widely believed that the attack had occurred some time before Dominique Strauss-Kahn was accused of the sexual assault.

HDguru.com's Gary Merson shared his story of logging into his account on Best Buy’s website where he noted that the system experienced some glitch corrupting many users’ accounts.

Merson found that his shipping address and telephone number had been changed to someone else's. If he'd bought something and whisked through the shipping info page without paying attention, his purchase would have ended up in Houston instead of his home in New York.

Mary Schapiro, Chairman of Securities and Exchange Commission, said that she will seriously consider to issue additional guidance on how public companies should disclose cyber security problems.

"Although we are not aware that investors have asked for more disclosure in this area, I have asked the commission staff to provide me with a briefing on current disclosure practices," Schapiro said in a letter to Senator John Rockefeller dated June 6 and released publicly on Wednesday.

Citigroup Inc has confirmed a data breach at its Citi Account Online, which resulted in that hundreds of thousands of bank card accounts were compromised. The hack was first reported by the Financial Times.

Recently Citi discovered unauthorized access to its Citi Account Online systems having conducted a routine monitoring. The company reported about 1% of card customers were affected by the hack. Citi said that names of the customers, account numbers and contact information including email addresses of the affected accounts were viewed.

Eric Corley, who publishes the hacker quarterly, 2600, said that about 25% of American hackers are informers for the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.

"Owing to the harsh penalties involved and the relative inexperience with the law that many hackers have, they are rather susceptible to intimidation," Corley told the Guardian.

A senior US official said that cyber security is now a top diplomatic priority for the United States and Washington as the government looks to build better relationship while properly addressing information theft and, thus, reducing the risk of conflicts.

Christopher Painter, Stated Department coordinator for cyber issues, said that the United States suffered a number of potential threats in cyberspace from freelance hackers to militants and potentially rival states. Diplomacy and policy was only just beginning to catch up with technology, he said.

Many US officials suspect that the latest cyber attacks on Lockheed Martin were orchestrated by some individual or an organization in China.

"It's unclear at this point precisely who conducted the attacks, but given past history with these sorts of things, there's a strong tendency to look east. The Far East, in fact, and a country that not so long ago hosted the Olympics," said one U.S. official who asked for anonymity, but was reluctant to point the finger at China by name.

A group of hackers reported a new successful hijacking of another Sony Corp’s computer networks to show that the electronic company lacks proper security in all its systems. LulzSec hackers broke into U.S. PBS television and Fox.com and accessed the information of more than 1 million customers. It published the names, birth dates, addresses, emails, phone numbers and passwords of thousands of people who had entered contests promoted by Sony.

Google reported that Chinese hackers again tried to steal the passwords of hundreds of Google email account holders, including those of senior U.S. government officials, Chinese activists and journalists.

According to the Mountain View report the violators came from Jinan, the capital of China's eastern Shandong province. Jinan is home to one of six technical reconnaissance bureaus belonging to the People's Liberation Army and a technical college that U.S. investigators last year linked to a previous attack on Google.

Sony PlayStation Network has not been hacked, according to a new statement made by the company in a blog post. Sony spokesperson Patrick Seybold says that the PlayStation Network wasn’t hacked so much as threatened yesterday when a password exploit accessible through its PSN web page login page came to light.

“We temporarily took down the PSN and Qriocity password reset page,” wrote Seybold, quickly adding “Contrary to some reports, there was no hack involved.”