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Hackers who support the Syrian government may be responsible for two separate attacks on the Reuters news agency. The hackers' efforts apparently caused false information about the political and military situation inside Syria to appear on the news ... agency's website. The first hack damaged the Reuters blogging platform, a section of the agency's website that allows Reuters correspondents to write personal accounts and opinion pieces under their own name. It appears Reuters reporters can post directly to the site, which may have made the hacker's job easier. Fake Interview Posted On Reuters ... (view more)

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's personal email account has reportedly been hacked. According to some observers, security weaknesses in Microsoft's Hotmail email service allowed the hack to occur. In reality, however, slip-ups by both ... Romney and Microsoft facilitated the hack. The incident occurred after the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) obtained and printed several emails sent to and from Romney during his time as governor of Massachusetts. The newspaper did not hack the account to obtain the emails, but rather made a legal request for Romney's office to hand them over. The WSJ ... (view more)

Picking a password that is both memorable and resistant to cracking is a difficult task. It seems easy to forget a random series of letters and numbers, and it's just as easy to guess (or 'crack') memorable passwords, such as your birthplace, your ... dog's name, or your favorite ball club. So it's helpful that Microsoft is expanding password management in Windows 8 by introducing "picture-based account unlocking," which allows PC users to draw circles, lines, and dots in place of text passwords. Drawing Passwords Hard to Guess Microsoft suggests that accessing an account via a ... (view more)

How much are you willing to spend on a brand-spanking-new operating system? $50? $100? $200? How about $4,000? $4,000 is the ghastly sum that was allegedly charged to the PayPal account of one Apple fan who recently downloaded the Cupertino-based ... company's newest operating system, Mac OS X Lion. Released July 20, 2011, Mac OS X Lion is the most recent version of Apple's flagship operating system. In just its first day of availability, Lion took a serious bite out the competition, being downloaded a reported one million times. It's the best start for any Apple OS, ever. (Source: eweek.com ) ... (view more)

A Michigan man could be jailed for up to five years after being charged with illegally accessing his wife's email account. But there are legal questions over the extent of privacy between married couples. The case involves Leon Walker, who shared a ... laptop in his home with his wife Clara, who has been married three times. Walker suspected she was having an affair with her second husband, which he was able to confirm after accessing her Gmail account. He then passed the relevant emails on to her first husband, who is the father of a child living at the couple's home. When the first husband went ... (view more)

Facebook is beefing up its security by offering a new remote logout feature that allows users to view the computers and other electronic devices connected to the social networking site with the option to disconnect any with a click. Devices can also ... be permanently disabled from accessing Facebook. Facebook's decision to introduce the feature is a reaction to recent security threats. Spammers have been using phishing tactics to convince Facebook users to enter their login and password information on fake web pages that look a lot like Facebook's entry screens. (Source: eweek.com ) Facebook ... (view more)

This week, we reported an iTunes vulnerability that exposes Windows users to over 40 different application attacks. Now, it seems that the same exploit is being used by hackers to infiltrate and drain PayPal accounts. "My account was charged over ... $4700. I called security at PayPal and was told a large number of iTunes store accounts were compromised," complained one customer in a recent post to blog TechCrunch. The same victim said he'd received almost fifty receipts from PayPal totaling $99.99 each, but was able to prevent these transactions from being recorded by his bank. Not everyone ... (view more)

Snooping Moms take note: hacking your kids' Facebook account, even to make sure they're not hanging around with the wrong crowd is most certainly not cool. In fact, one 16-year-old from Arkansas was so incensed at his Mom's nosing around that he's ... decided to sue her for harassment. Denise New of Arkadelphia, AR decided something needed to be done about her son when she found evidence on his Facebook "wall" of a 95 mph speeding incident (the issue, of course, was connected with a girl). (Source: eweek.com ) Concerned, New successfully infiltrated her son's Facebook account, allegedly changed ... (view more)

A French hacker has been arrested in connection to the hacking of a Twitter account owned by U.S. President Barack Obama. The suspect, known by the nickname "Hacker Croll," has since been arrested in his home country. "Hacker Croll" is actually a 25 ... year old male and is already infamous for his targeting of high-profile social networking accounts. He was allegedly responsible for a similar attack on Britney Spears a year ago after gaining access to Twitter's internal administrative network by acquiring the password of an employee. In order to get his dirty little hands on the latter ... (view more)

Imagine logging onto your Facebook page from a mobile phone and discovering that you have been given full access to someone else's account. That is exactly what happened to a woman from Georgia and her two daughters. For a short period of time, the ... Internet seemed to lose track of which people controlled which accounts. While details on the event remain sketchy, experts say the issue was the result of a routing problem. User Name and Password Bypassed Cadence Sawyer suspected something was wrong after she had typed Facebook.com into her Nokia smartphone. Her account seemed to open without the ... (view more)