U.S. utilities and industries face a rising number of cyber break-ins by attackers using more sophisticated methods, a senior Homeland Security Department official said during the government’s first media tour of secretive defense labs intended to protect the U.S. power grid, water systems and other vulnerable infrastructure.

The MySQL site, whose open-source repository serves some of the most popular Web sites, has been hacked and was being used to serve malware to visitors running Windows before it was cleaned up today, a security firm said.

An Australian security expert respected for his work testing the defences of Apple software has published a method which appears to allow an attacker to break through the password defences of Cupertino’s latest Mac OS X Lion operating system.

Along with a picture of Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, the hacked home page showed a message saying the “Syrian Electronic Army Were Here”.

The same group that hacked NBC News’ Twitter account on September 9 and sent tweets about a bogus attack on Ground Zero apparently grabbed hold of USA Today’s Twitter feed today and fired off a clutch of messages.

The U.S. Department of Justice accused celebrity poker players Howard Lederer and Christopher Ferguson and other executives who ran the Web site Full Tilt Poker of defrauding players of more than $300 million, The Wall Street Journal reported today.

An Arizona college student was arrested and charged Thursday in a breach of computers at Sony Pictures Entertainment early this summer where more than 37,000 customers had their information stolen.

A Russian hacker who breached the security of RBS’ WorldPay service and stole $9m (£6m) has had his property sold to compensate the bank. Viktor Pleshchuk’s two flats and two cars, a BMW and a Lada, were auctioned off in Saint Petersburg on Monday.

Security firm Sourcefire has published its latest report on malware threats and says that the “analysis highlighted interesting comparisons between the United States and the UK”.

London’s police force said it was dropping a demand that The Guardian newspaper reveal the confidential sources for its stories about Britain’s phone-hacking scandal. The decision follows a unified chorus of criticism from the country’s hyper-competitive media outlets.