Hackers, Hacked | 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.

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

A Chrysler spokesman says someone hacked into the Jeep brand's twitter account Tuesday afternoon, making false Tweets for about an hour until the company that handles its social media regained control.

Anonymous added its tribute to the many online memorials honoring Aaron Swartz, hacking into and temporarily taking over the MIT website to eulogize the programmer and Internet activist and call for computer crime law reform.

Several NBC websites were hacked on Sunday by a person or group calling itself "pyknic" and suggesting a possible link to the cyber-attack group Anonymous.

GoDaddy, the massive Web hosting company, went down on Monday, taking an untold number of websites with it. A person affiliated with the hacking collective Anonymous -- named @AnonymousOwn3r on Twitter -- claimed responsibility for the outage.

Hackers have demonstrated support for Pussy Riot, defacing the website of the court that recently convicted the band. The group Anonymous Russia offered an unambiguous opinion on the punks' two-year sentencing, posting Pussy Riot's new single and declaring: "Wake up, comrades!"

The company said that although the breached accounts include user names from Yahoo and other companies, only 5% of the accounts had valid passwords. Yahoo said it is working to fix the vulnerability and is changing the passwords of the affected users. The company also said it is notifying other companies whose users may have been affected -- earlier we reported that they may include people who use AOL, Gmail, Hotmail and many others.

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.