Hackers | featured news

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.

For computer users, a few mouse clicks could mean the difference between staying online and losing Internet connections this summer. Unknown to most of them, their problem began when international hackers ran an online advertising scam to take control of infected computers around the world. In a highly unusual response, the FBI set up a safety net months ago using government computers to prevent Internet disruptions for those infected I users. But that system is to be shut down.

Rupert Murdoch's Times of London is facing a claim for exemplary damages after admitting hacking into the email of an anonymous police blogger to expose his identity, lawyer Mark Lewis told Reuters on Friday.

The hacker group known as LulzSec appears to be back after many months of laying low, claiming to have exposed the accounts of nearly 171,000 members of the military.

One of the world's most-wanted cyber hackers secretly became an FBI informant last year and helped bring in five other suspected leaders of the loose-knit international Anonymous group who were charged with computer crimes on Tuesday.

Cyber rebels from Anonymous announced Friday the group has carried out a new series of attacks against U.S. government websites to protest a global copyright treaty. Anonymous said in a statement posted to the Internet that it had attacked websites for the Federal Trade Commission's consumer protection business center and the National Consumer Protection Week.

A hacker claims to have compromised users' personal info after breaking into a discussion forum maintained by pornography website Brazzers.

Hackers affiliated with the Anonymous hacking group obtained more than 150 police officers' personal information from an old website for the West Virginia Chiefs of Police Association and posted...

Perpetual gadflies Anonymous released a recording between agents at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Scotland Yard on Friday in which the two agencies discuss anti-hacking operations.

After a Department of Justice-executed raid today on the file sharing site Megaupload, hackers aligned with the online collective Anonymous have shut down the websites for both the DoJ and Universal Music Group, the largest record company in America.