Russia

A Russian spacecraft containing 45 mice, 8 gerbils, and 15 newts returned to Earth on Sunday. The spacecraft, a modified Bion-M life sciences satellite, was launched in April 2013 and was intended to study the biological effects of long-term weightlessness. However, due to a combination of equipment failure and what scientists referred to as "the stresses of space," fewer than half the mice (and none of the gerbils) remained alive after their month in space. The newts were fine, though.

NBN Co, the company building Australia's National Broadband Network, has found itself having to refute reports in the finance press that its networks had been “penetrated” by “cyber gangs”.

While attacks and scans are the lot of any and every network administrator, the company says the reported Trojan infections never got past a couple of user desktops.

A major cyberattack against a European spam tracking company this past week appears to have originated from a gang of Russian hackers, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

Spamhaus, a Geneva-based spam tracking firm, had been the target of a massive distributed-denial-of-service attack, where at one point traffic flowing to the site reached levels of 300 Gbps.

THE ABC is investigating claims that one of its websites was hacked by Russian cybercriminals in 2011.

Information security analyst Patrick Gray first published the claim on his blog, risky.biz, saying cybercrooks obtained information from an ABC database, including an encrypted staff password, around October 2011. An ABC spokesman told AAP today that the corporation is investigating the allegation.

Russian hackers are holding a Gold Coast medical centre to ransom after encrypting thousands of patient health records.

The hackers are asking for a ransom of $4,000 to decrypt the sensitive information held on a server at the Miami Family Medical Centre.

Team GhostShell, the hacker group responsible for the recent leak of some 120,000+ records raided from top universities around the world, has done it again.

If you want to buy a botnet, it'll cost you somewhere in the region of $700. If you just want to hire someone else's for an hour, though, it can cost as little as $2—that's long enough to take down, say, a call center, if that's what you were in the mood for. Maybe you'd like to spy on an ex—for $350 you can purchase a trojan that lets you see all their incoming and outgoing texts. Or maybe you're just in the market for some good, old-fashioned spamming—it'll only cost you $10 for a million e-mails. That's the hourly minimum wage in the UK.

After a persistent series of attacks on its government computers by a Russian hacker, the Republic of Georgia got mad and refused to take it anymore.

In a reversal of roles, members of the country's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) suckered the cybermiscreant into downloading a file infected with his own spyware that allowed CERT to photograph the alleged hacker with his computer's webcam and ransack its hard drive for files.

The website of a Moscow court that convicted three members of punk band Pussy Riot to two years in jail each for belting out a profanity-laced anti-Kremlin song inside a cathedral was hacked on Tuesday.

A slogan denouncing President Vladimir Putin was posted on the site as was an appeal for the trio's release along with a video clip of one of the band's latest anti-Putin songs and a clip by Bulgarian singer Azis, local media reported.

The U.S. government has a plan to put the skills of the best hackers in the world to work fighting terrorism and designing security systems for government agencies. John Arquilla, an adviser to U.S. President Barack Obama’s and the man who coined the term “cyberwarfare” told the UK’s Guardian newspaper that the U.S. Defense Department plans to hire about 100 hackers, primarily Russians for the initiative.