Hacker

Prosecutors want the man who broke into the email accounts of Scarlett Johansson, Mila Kunis and other celebrities to receive a hefty prison fine and pay tens of thousands of dollars to his victims.

In a filing, U.S. attorney requested that Christopher Chaney, 35, of Jacksonville, Fla., serve 71 months in prison and pay a $150,000 fine. He would also should pay Johansson $66,179.46 in compensation after hijacking nude images of the actress from her personal email account.

A Cowra man charged with hacking into systems owned by telco wholesaler Platform Networks has been sentenced to two-and-a-half years' jail by an Orange District Court.

David Noel Cecil, a 25-year-old unemployed truck driver, initially faced up to 12 years' jail on a total 40 charges of unauthorised access and modification to computer systems maintained by Platform, which was acquired by EFTel in August last year.

A Dutch citizen yesterday pled not guilty to charges related to the theft of over 44,000 credit card numbers.

"David Benjamin Schrooten, aka 'Fortezza,' is being targeted by federal prosecutors for allegedly hacking into computers and stealing massive amounts of credit card numbers," writes CNET News' Dara Kerr. "Once he obtained the numbers, he allegedly sold them in bulk quantities via different Web sites. The 44,000 is reportedly from just one sale."

ZDNet's Emil Protalinski reports that a hacker calling himself "Nyre" has claimed responsibility for a recent cyber attack that took down The Pirate Bay.

In a Pastebin post, Nyre writes, "I am highly against Anonymous. I do not support Anonymous anymore. I sometimes help the feds. The Pirate Bay was a press-release website for Anonymous, then I had a idea, why not take it down? Why not make it impossible for Anonymous? Get on your knees, Anonymous. I am a one-man army. I am not a hacker. I am a security killer."

A 23-year-old hacker in the UK has been sentenced to 26 months in prison after using a Trojan to steal the identities of eight million victims.

Edward Pearson, from York, was able to acquire the data using malware like Zeus and Spyeye, taking information on credit cards, PayPal accounts as well as dates of birth, postcodes and names. Police said he could have gotten away with £834,000 if he had used the stolen data more effectively, yet he only accrued £2,351 illicitly, York paper the Press reported.

A security researcher based in Russia pocketed a cool $60,000 from Google on Wednesday after he submitted a a "full exploit" for a vulnerability in the difficult-to-compromise Chrome browser.

The winning entry was part of the inaugural Pwnium contest, in which Google is offering up to $1 million in prizes for bug hunters who can find a way to defeat its browser's much-vaunted sandbox architecture. The competition occurs at the annual CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, British Columbia and coincides with the well-known Pwn2Own contest, run by HP TippingPoint.

A hacker claims to have compromised the personal information of more than 350,000 users after breaking into a disused website operated by pornography provider Brazzers.

Kate Miller, director of communications for site owner Manwin Holding SARL, said Saturday it was "currently investigating the issue" but that no credit card information has been leaked.

A software developer and amateur hacker has claimed the existence of exploits for wireless routers currently used by Eircom that theoretically would allow hackers who know what they are doing to break into their neighbours’ wireless networks.

In a blog published this morning, software developer Ross Canpolet referred to an exploit called RouterPWN v:1.3.138 that allows several methods of hacking routers and modems, such as Eircom’s popular ZyXEL P-660.

The former college student imprisoned for hacking the email account of Sarah Palin has had his appeal against the charge on which he was convicted rejected by a US court.

David Kernell, who has already been released after serving 11 months for his hacking the former vice Presidential candidate’s Yahoo account in 2008, had appealed against his conviction for obstructing the course of justice.

Is today Twitter hack day and nobody said anything?

Two separate hack attacks today have targeted one the Web's largest blogs and one of its largest mini-bloggers, and one of these entities appears to be fighting back. But it's unclear just what Ashton Kutcher plans to do should he find the user that simultaneously broke into his Twitter and Foursquare accounts today.