Law and Order

The US is planning a legal assault on the international hacking community and the companies – and governments – that use IP stolen from America.

John Carlin, the principal deputy assistant attorney general in the US Department of Justice’s national security division told Defense News that the DOJ was training over 100 special prosecutors who would work with a variety of government departments, including the FBI, Homeland Security, and NSA.

While Apple had a stunning $1.05 billion trial victory against Samsung this summer, things generally haven't been going its way since the August verdict. On Monday, US District Judge Lucy Koh ruled that Apple's case wasn't strong enough to win an injunction.

If the ethics of hacking celebrities’ e-mail accounts doesn’t stop you from doing it, perhaps a decade-long jail sentence will.

On Monday, a Florida man found guilty of gaining access to 50 e-mail accounts—including those of Scarlett Johansson, Mila Kunis, Renee Olstead, and others—was sentenced on federal charges to 10 years in jail. Chaney pled guilty to nine counts of "aggravated identity theft," "wiretapping," and other crimes earlier this year.

A leading Australian Internet service provider has pulled out of negotiations to create a warning notice scheme aimed at reducing online piracy. iiNet, the ISP that was sued by Hollywood after refusing to help chase down alleged infringers, said that it can’t make any progress with righthsolders if they don’t make their content freely available at a reasonable price. The ISP adds that holding extra data on customers’ habits is inappropriate and not their responsibility.

International authorities, with some help from Facebook, have arrested 10 people accused of operating a network of infected computers that stole personal information from millions of victims.

The Justice Department said Tuesday night that the F.B.I. and international agencies were helped in their investigations by Facebook, whose users were among those targeted by the malware, or malicious software, over the last several years. The agencies arrested people from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Britain, Croatia, Macedonia, New Zealand, Peru and the United States, the F.B.I. said.

Charges against Gary McKinnon for breaching US government IT systems have been dropped by UK authorities, bringing a decade long battle to an end.

In a statement from the Crown Prosecution Court and Metropolitan Police it was announced that a case against McKinnon would not proceed in the UK, following the decision to block his extradition to the US.

The HP boardroom spying scandal once transfixed the national media. It sparked Congressional hearings and lawsuits, and it changed the law. But it ended on Thursday in a mostly empty San Jose, California courtroom with a three-month conviction for Bryan Wagner, the low-level foot soldier who called up telephone companies under false pretenses to obtain the telephone records of HP board members, journalists and their families.

Japanese police are looking for an individual who can code in C#, uses a "Syberian Post Office" to make anonymous posts online, and knows how to surf the web without leaving any digital tracks -- and they're willing to pay.

It is the first time that Japan's National Police Agency has offered a monetary reward for a wanted hacker, or put so much technical detail into one of its wanted postings. The NPA will pay up to AY=3 million yen (US$36,000), the maximum allowed under its reward system.

The antics of security software founder John McAfee may have seemed pretty insane, but he now says that at least some of his actions were a ruse.

McAfee, speaking with ABC News after arriving in the U.S., said he faked an illness to avoid being sent back to Belize from Guatemala, and he also thanked the media for closely covering his story.

"It was a deception but who did it hurt? I look pretty healthy, don't I?," he said during an interview with ABC at a Miami Beach hotel.

The antivirus pioneer John McAfee is headed back to the United States after authorities in Guatemala expelled him earlier today for illegally entering the country in an attempt to escape authorities in Belize, where he is wanted for questioning in connection with a murder.

In a phone interview with Bloomberg News this afternoon, the 67-year old said he was being put on an American Airlines flight to Miami on Wednesday afternoon.