Anonymous

Coordinated teams of hacktivists will wage war on Sony on Monday to punish the company for supporting the controversial US Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

The Anonymous collective plans to hack Sony.com and load the homepage with BitTorrent files that allow users to download copyright-protected music and movies -- the very action SOPA is designed to prevent.

Hackers claiming to be part of hacktivist collective Anonymous have been accused of issuing a bomb threat and launching a campaign of cyber attacks against a Finnish anti-piracy group.

The actions were made in protest against the Finnish government’s decision to force Elisa, one of the country’s largest ISPs, to block access to file-sharing site The Pirate Bay.

The group "Anonymous" claims to be an arm of the Occupy movement and has made headlines for stealing credit card numbers and publishing personal information of police officers. A report by CNN's Amber Lyon might have made audiences think twice about their dubious reputation with her sneak-peek of an upcoming CNN Presents story "Anonymous" that airs Saturday night at 8 p.m.

Intelligence analysis publisher Stratfor is back online (though their servers seem somewhat taxed at the moment), following a hack over Christmas which resulted in the theft of personal information, including credit card information, of some of the company’s subscribers. The company is providing identity theft protection for its affected customers through identity protection company CSID.

Anonymous had a busy year in 2011 pushing its hacker-activist agenda on companies around the Web, to the point where just the sound of the hacker group's name can send shivers down the spine of many a CIO.

Anonymous in 2011 took on everything from HB Gary to a Mexican cartel, from oil companies to banks, from NBC to a transportation site. The group has positioned itself as a kind of Internet-based Robin Hood; when it hacked banks, the group claimed it was helping "the 99%" by giving money from the banks back to the people who rightfully deserved it.

Politicians associated with the opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party are included on a list of “Polish neo-nazis” uploaded onto the internet by the Anonymous hacking group.

The data is part a trove of information, including emails, passwords and credit card details hacked by the Anonymous collective over the past few weeks, including data taken from the US-based Stratfor security analyst company over the Christmas period.

Cyber-activists attacked the websites of Finnish anti-piracy groups after a local internet service provider was forced to block access to a popular file-sharing website, officials said.

Antti Kotilainen, a spokesman for the Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Centre (CIAPC), told AFP that websites run by his organisation and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) had been "down since Monday".

Anonymous, move over. WikiLeaks, take a hike. There's a new uber hacking/whistleblowing group in town with some serious game and a wicked cool name that's putting you both to shame.

The Lords of Dharmaraja is the group behind the theft of Symantec's Norton AntiVirus source code from India's intelligence agencies. It's also the group that claims to have broken into the servers of India's embassy in Paris last summer. Now it's released a bombshell memo that appears to document collusion between the world's largest makers of smartphones and India's spy services.

Thousands of British email addresses and encrypted passwords, including those of defence, intelligence and police officials as well as politicians and Nato advisers, have been revealed on the internet following a security breach by hackers.

Continuing its New Year's hacking rampage the Anonymous collective has re-targeted the FBI, posting a new link to data allegedly taken in its latest hack on the U.S. law enforcement agency.