Hackers

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".

The US authorities are investigating allegations that an Indian government spy unit hacked into emails of an official US commission that monitors economic and security relations between the United States and China, including cyber-security issues.

The request for an investigation came after hackers posted on the Internet what purports to be an Indian military intelligence document on cyber-spying, which discusses plans to target the commission - apparently using technical know-how provided by Western mobile phone manufacturers.

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.

Two German researchers have exploited security holes in a smart meter service to alter energy consumption rates, expose privacy flaws and determine what movies consumers had watched.

Dario Carluccio and Stephan Brinkhaus demonstrated the flaws with German energy company Discovergy at the Chaos Computing Congress in Berlin.

The U.S. State Department has labeled Venezuela's consul general in Miami persona non grata and ordered her out of the country by Tuesday after some Mexican students said she'd expressed interest in their offer to hack U.S. government websites and nuclear plants. It's like something out of the movie Hackers, combined with 21, as the students reportedly plotted a cyber attack on U.S. sites at the behest of a leftist professor.

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.

Symantec confirmed late Thursday that hackers compromised some source code relating to two discontinued enterprise security products.

The code belonged to Endpoint Protection 11.0 and Antivirus 10.2, which are four and five years old, respectively. Symantec's consumer security line, Norton, was not affected.

Israel said on Saturday that it will respond to cyber-attacks in the same way it responds to violent "terrorist" acts, by striking back with force against hackers who threaten the Jewish state.

The message from Deputy Foreign Minister Dany Ayalon came after a self-defined "Saudi hacker" from a cabal known as "group-xp" published details of more than 6,000 Israeli credit cards online.

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.

The hackers behind the year-end attack on the security consulting firm Stratfor have struck again, although this time it appears they are just out for a few laughs.