Hacking | featured news

A gang of cyber-criminals stole $45 million in a matter of hours by hacking their way into a database of prepaid debit cards and then draining cash machines around the globe, federal prosecutors said Thursday.

For a few surreal minutes, a mere 12 words on Twitter caused the world's mightiest stock market to tremble. No sooner did hackers send a false Associated Press tweet reporting explosions at the White House on Tuesday than investors started dumping stocks - eventually unloading $134 billion worth. Turns out, some investors are not only gullible, they're impossibly fast stock traders.

Australian police have arrested a man they say is affiliated with international hacking collective Lulz Security on a charge of attacking and defacing a government website, officials said Wednesday.

Hackers compromised Twitter accounts of The Associated Press on Tuesday, sending out a false tweet about an attack at the White House.

Analyses of hundreds of documented data breaches found that hackers affiliated with the Chinese government were by far the most energetic and successful cyberspies in the world last year, according to a report to be issued Tuesday by government and industry investigators.

The Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg has been charged with hacking into several Swedish companies and stealing personal data.

Could this be the deadliest smartphone app ever? A German security consultant, who's also a commercial pilot, has demonstrated tools he says could be used to hijack an airplane remotely, using just an Android phone. Speaking at the Hack in the Box security summit in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Hugo Teso said Wednesday that he spent three years developing SIMON, a framework of malicious code that could be used to attack and exploit airline security software, and an Android app to run it that he calls PlaneSploit.

Hackers apparently broke into at least two of North Korea's government-run online sites Thursday, as tensions rose on the Korean Peninsula. The North's Uriminzokkiri Twitter and Flickr accounts stopped sending out content typical of that posted by the regime in Pyongyang, such as photos of North's leader Kim Jong Un meeting with military officials.

U.S. prosecutors obtained an indictment on Thursday accusing Matthew Keys, deputy social media editor at reuters.com, of aiding the group Anonymous to hack into a Tribune Co website.

Hackers targeted dozens of computer systems at government agencies across Europe in a series of attacks that exploited a recently discovered security flaw in Adobe Systems Inc's software, security researchers reported on Wednesday.