Posting a hoax about someone dying on the Internet is clearly a sick thing to do. Not only can fans and followers be tricked into believing it’s true, so also can family and friends. But there’s another bad result, which is that hackers quickly pick up on the hoax and use it to their advantage. Which is what happened with the RIP Kanye West prank which journeyed from 4Chan to email to Twitter to malware in the space of just a few hours.

A man accused of unlawfully hacking into NASA’s computer systems has been refused permission to appeal to Britain’s supreme court against extradition to the United States. Gary McKinnon’s only remaining option, an appeal to European courts, appears unlikely to succeed.

Analysis of the list of Hotmail passwords recently published online suggests they may have been gathered by phishing attacks aimed at the Latino community. It also suggests many people are either unimaginative or lazy when it comes to choosing a password.

With worries over cyber-attacks growing, questions are beginning to arise about what powers the Obama administration has in defending against coordinated attacks against critical American sites.

Google has told the European Union that a proposed deal to settle the row over its book search system will aid democracy. The firm is trying to smooth over hostilities on the continent with the governments of both France and Germany lining up against the deal.

Lawyers for Albert Gonzalez, accused of carrying out the biggest series of credit and debit card data thefts in history, appear close to formally admitting his involvement. But they maintain he was merely an associate rather than the mastermind.

The struggle against terrorism has components at many different levels and includes a wide variety of people, including a tiny army of five women in Singapore who watch terrorists in cyberspace.

Comcast is the largest cable service provider in the US, providing hi-speed broadband Internet service to millions of homes. The cable company recently came under fire for implementing a new service that redirects bad URLs to a page with advertisements. This has many questioning Comcast’s motivation as it seems like the company is capitalizing on the user’s misfortune.

Denizens of a couple of social networks were faced with quitting cold turkey when attacks on an eastern European blogger took down the sites upon which they have come to rely for contact with friends and relatives.

Researchers are warning of malicious Adobe PDF documents circulating online. The documents cause Adobe Reader to crash and allow hackers to exploit a hole in Adobe’s Flash player.

AT&T has temporarily blocked its DSL subscribers from accessing the controversial image and message board site 4chan. The fallout could tell us something of the relative powers of corporations and individual users in the online age.

Now anonymous sources within the government of South Korea are saying what so many of us have been thinking: the North Korean government was behind last weekend’s cyber attacks on South Korea.

As more and more software packages, clients, and businesses move their data into the cloud, more and more cyber-attacks and fraud will be done in the cloud, says a cyber-crime federal prosecutor.

Prior to the official announcement that Michael Jackson was dead, there was a flurry of rumors going across the Web causing much confusion. Many sites were reporting that Michael Jackson was in a state of deep coma while others were reporting of his passing. It has been found that devious hackers have taken advantage of this confusion by leveraging virus and spam attacks disguised as Michael Jackson information.

A prominent computer hacker was sworn in Friday to the Homeland Security Advisory Council, a group which provides advice to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

The Federal Trade Commission has closed down an Internet service provider described today as “nefarious” and the “worst ISP in [the] U.S.” And that’s some of the nicer things people have said.

Dmitriy Guzner campaigned against Scientology under the ‘Anonymous’ banner. And while he campaigned without a name, he may soon be gaining a number – in prison.