Internet, Hacking | featured news

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.

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.

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.

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

Rupert Murdoch tweets that the Wall Street Journal newspaper is still being attacked by Chinese hackers.

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