Internet Security, Hackers | featured news

Yahoo has been the victim of a security breach that yielded hundreds of thousands of login credentials stored in plain text. The hacked data, posted to the hacker site D33D Company, contained more than 453,000 login credentials and appears to have originated from the Web pioneer's network. The hackers, who said they used a union-based SQL injection technique to penetrate the Yahoo subdomain, intended the data dump to be a "wake-up call."

Yahoo Inc. said Thursday it is investigating reports of a security breach that may have exposed nearly half a million users' email addresses and passwords... The little-known group was quoted as saying that they had stolen the passwords using an SQL injection -- the name given to a commonly-used attack in which hackers use rogue commands to extract data from vulnerable websites.

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.

In a letter posted on the Zappos Web site, the company's chief executive said a "criminal" might have obtained customers' names, addresses, phone numbers and partial credit card information.

As implantable medical devices such as pacemakers and insulin pumps have become more common, one innovative feature has been the addition of the ability to control the devices wirelessly via the internet. This approach has enabled doctors to improve the well-being of their patients through additional data monitoring and control without the need for additional surgery. But it’s also opened the door for security threats.

Five security alerts are issued for Facebook as security firms say social networking sites are tempting targets for hackers.