Social Networking, Hacking | featured news

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

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.

The attacks over the past month by sophisticated malware seemed to be similar to those recently directed at Twitter and other companies.

Twitter said it had detected "sophisticated" unauthorized attempts to access information from the short-messaging service used by more than 200 million people.

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.

Porn, violent images and other graphic pieces of content are spreading across Facebook in what appears to be a widespread and ugly spam attack.

Apparently, "Anonymous" won't be accepting your friend request.