To many, a hacker is anyone who does something with a computer that is not trivially understood. To law-enforcement and the criminal justice system, a hacker is someone who commits a computer-involved crime.

In 1970, a 14-year-old boy dialed into a nationwide computer network, uploaded a virus he had written and caused the entire network to crash. That boy was Bill Gates. Five years later, he founded Microsoft.

More than 1,600 customers’ names, genders, mailing addresses and e-mail addresses were compromised.

The Police Central E-Crime Unit (PCeU) of London’s Metropolitan Police Service has announced the sentencing of two Ukrainian cybercrooks. Yuriy Konovalenko, 29, and Yevhen Kulibaba, 33, were sent down for just short of five years each.

Barrett Brown, a sometimes spokesman for the hacker collective Anonymous, said Thursday that the Zeta Mexican cartel had freed a kidnapped member of its group, but that he would continue to battle the violent gang on his own, outside of Anonymous. The issue has divided the hacker community, with some Anonymous members calling for Brown [...]

In a recent YouTube video, Anonymous makes vague threats a against alleged kidnappers. The video does not identify the missing member of its group, but says he was kidnapped while he was “doing Paperstorm,” which is a reference to posting flyers and other printed messages in public spaces.

A high-tech military contractor, which suffered an attack from hackers earlier this year, is reported to have lost sensitive data related to defence equipment including fighter jet planes and nuclear power plant plans.

The death of Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi has almost inevitably resulted in cybercriminals taking advantage of the news story, and the general public’s seeming interest in viewing ghoulish photos and videos of his last moments. Malicious hackers have spammed out an attack posing as pictures of Gaddafi’s death, tricking users into believing that they came [...]

Anonymous, the group of high-powered hackers famous for taking down websites belonging to Bank of America and Sony, has turned its vigilante brand of online activism to child pornography sites.

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.