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I don’t know what’s going on around here (see this thread) but there is a definite trend on what is happening to major web based companies this week. When I tried to check my eBay account this morning, this is the message I received: "THIS PAGE CAN'T BE DISPLAYED"

Former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden began downloading documents describing the U.S. government's electronic spying programs while he was working for Dell Inc in April 2012, almost a year earlier than previously reported, according to U.S. officials and other sources familiar with the matter.

Latvia’s government has approved the extradition of a man accused by the United States of helping create a virus that affected over a million computers worldwide and allowed hackers to steal millions of dollars from bank accounts. Deniss Calovskis was accused by U.S. authorities in January of participating in a conspiracy to infect computers with a virtually undetectable virus that intercepted and sent out sensitive data such as bank account numbers and passwords to unauthorized users. …

A journalist and a researcher have sued the Justice Department for access to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s records on the late journalist Michael Hastings. The lawsuit follows the FBI’s failure to respond to separate Freedom of Information Act requests for records on Hastings submitted by journalist Jason Leopold of al-Jazeera and Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Ryan Shapiro. Agencies are required by statute to notify applicants about whether it will fulfill their requests within a 20-working-day period of the initial application. In the hours before his death, which was ruled an accident by the Los Angeles Police Department, Hastings...

AUGUST 1--As a notorious hacker seeks to distribute “very personal” e-mails sent to Colin Powell by a female Romanian diplomat, the retired general is denying that he engaged in an extramarital affair with the woman while he served as Secretary of State, though he recently advised her to delete all their online exchanges, The Smoking Gun has learned. In a statement addressing his relationship with Corina Cretu, a member of the European Parliament who previously held a series of senior posts in the Romanian government, Powell, 76, wrote that he has known Cretu for about 10 years, having first met...

Barnaby Jack, a celebrated computer hacker who could force a bank ATM to spit out cash and sparked safety improvements in medical devices, has died in San Francisco. The San Francisco Medical Examiner's Office said Jack died in the city on Thursday. It gave no details. He was believed to be in his mid-30s. Jack was due to appear at the Black Hat hacking convention in Las Vegas next week, demonstrating techniques for remotely attacking implanted heart devices. He said he could kill a man from 30 feet away. His genius was finding bugs in the tiny computers embedded in...

A computer hacker who gained cult status across the internet after revealing how to hack cash machines has been found a week before he was due to demonstrate how to kill someone by hacking their pacemaker. The body of Barnaby Jack was found in San Francisco yesterday. The city's medical examiner's office would not give any further details. Jack, a security expert, became one of the most famous hackers on the planet after a 2010 demonstration in which he forced ATMs to spit out cash, dubbed 'Jackpotting'.

CBS News reporter, Sharyl Attkisson, one of the very few real reporters left in the mainstream media, appeared on Monday’s O’Reilly Factor, telling Bill O’Reilly that she thinks she knew who hacked her computer (scroll down for video). In the interview, Attkisson begins by explaining that both her personal computer, as well as her CBS work computer would mysteriously turn on in the middle of the night, even though she’d shut them down...

CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson appeared on "CBS This Morning" to discuss the hacking of her computer, which CBS News say they have verified through what Attkisson describes as an "independent cyber-security firm." She added that whoever did the hack was "highly skilled and used very sophisticated methods." Throughout the reign of Barack Obama, Attkisson has distinguished herself in media as the rare reporter actually willing to do more than protect, cheerlead, and play stenographer for the White House.

I've been Hacked! A thief has obtained my email address, phone number and mailing address. The vandal has sent my information to a number of businessess requesting services and ordered dozens of boxes of mailing supplies to be deivered to my house. So far my credit cards and bank accounts have not been touched nor have any new credit cards been ordered. I have notified the police, the postal inspector web site, my credit report service and the businesses affected. I guess I need to close my email account next or at lesst change the password. The pranks have not...

Earlier this week, I wrote about the dirty tricks campaign against journalist Amir Taheri following his revelation that, in a private meeting in Iraq last July with Iraqi leaders, Barack Obama tried to persuade them to delay the agreement being hammered out with the US government on a draw-down of the American military presence. According to this account, which quoted Iraq’s foreign minister Hoshya Zebari (pictured), Obama had thus privately sought to undermine an American government foreign policy initiative – an explosive revelation. Taheri subsequently dismissed as tendentious Camp Obama’s response which he said deliberately confused two separate agreements under...

SNIPPET: "U.S. officials familiar with intelligence reports said the websites of Ansar al-Mujahidin, Shumukh al-Islam and Al Fida — all accredited as official outlets of the terrorist group once led by Osama bin Laden — were knocked off the Internet by cyberattacks in early May. Two of the sites — Ansar al-Mujahidin (as-ansar.com) and Shumukh al-Islam (shamikh1.info) — came back up Monday and Tuesday. The site Al Fida remains down." SNIPPET: "The disruptions are prompting many jihadists to shift from Web forums to Twitter for communications and propaganda messaging."

It was a brazen bank heist, but a 21st-century version in which the criminals never wore ski masks, threatened a teller or set foot in a vault. In two precision operations that involved people in more than two dozen countries acting in close coordination and with surgical precision, thieves stole $45 million from thousands of A.T.M.'s in a matter of hours. In New York City alone, the thieves responsible for A.T.M. withdrawals struck 2,904 machines over 10 hours starting on Feb. 19, withdrawing $2.4 million. The operation included sophisticated computer experts operating in the shadowy world of Internet hacking, manipulating...

Middle East- and North Africa-based criminal hackers are preparing cyberattacks this week against the websites of high-profile U.S. government agencies, banks and other companies, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The attacks, dubbed #OpUSA, for Operation USA, will begin Tuesday, the department said in a warning bulletin circulated to the private sector last week. The bulletin was first obtained and posted online by blogger and cybercrime expert Brian Krebs.

On April 25, Spanish police, at the request of Holland's national prosecutor's office, arrested Dutch citizen Sven Olaf Kamphuis. Kamphuis will likely face charges in Holland related to what Dutch officials describe as the most extensive criminal cyberattacks in the history of the Internet. The attacks, which occurred in mid-March, overwhelmed the website of Spamhaus, a European nonprofit organization that tracks computer viruses (malware) and spam (unwanted email). Spamhaus had blacklisted Kamphuis' Internet company, CyberBunker. Spamhaus alleged that CyberBunker provided hosting services for spammers. The attacks (distributed denial of service, DDOS attacks) not only denied Internet users access to the...

On the back of widespread public interest RT has decided to publish in their entirety a series of memos which were allegedly sent from a one-time White House aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

In e-mail blasts this weekend, “Guccifer” sent documents stolen from the e-mail account of a former White House aide to congressional aides, political figures, and journalists. Armed with confidential memos to Hillary Clinton that were stolen from the e-mail account of a former White House aide, a hacker has distributed some of the documents to a wide array of congressional aides, political figures, and journalists worldwide. In a series of weekend e-mail blasts, the hacker known as “Guccifer” disseminated four recent memos to Clinton from Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime confidant of the former Secretary of State.

Michelle Obama is the latest victim of a group of hackers targeting celebrities. This time, they even hacked the organization that's after them -- Robert Mueller, the Director of the FBI! Read more: http://www.tmz.com/videos/0_ntu8q9o0/#ixzz2NWbXvTsM I do not know if this is true as I've not seen it anywhere else but TMZ so I am putting this in chat. They are, however, often the first to break a story such as the pictures of Harry's Vegas vacation and Tiger getting in trouble with the wife. They also claim to research the truth to their stories and in the vid, the one...

Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox all fell to the mercy of the hackers Thursday. That is, in a controlled environment. Security firms Vupen and MWR Labs were able to crack the browsers during a condoned bug-hunt, with one company winning $100,000 for finding a huge hole. The Pwn2Own competition is an event at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver. The competition was created by HP’s DVLabs as part of its Zero Day Initiative: an attempt to get more people to find and report bugs as opposed to exploiting them for personal gains.

Cyberwar: A cybersecurity firm reports a secretive Chinese military unit is behind many recent "hack attacks" into U.S. computers, stealing trade and military secrets and developing a potentially crippling new weapon. In a 2009 editorial we noted that units of China's armed forces, whom we dubbed its "Cybertooth Tigers" were developing capabilities to penetrate and potentially disrupt U.S. computer systems as part of the People's Liberation Army's focus on what is known as "asymmetrical" warfare, specifically cyber-warfare. At least as far back as the 2008 edition of the Pentagon's annual report to Congress entitled "Military Power of the People's Republic...