Jake Davis, an 18 year-old believed by Scotland Yard to be the leader of the hacker group LulzSec, was released on bail this morning. He appeared at a City of Westminster Magistrates' Court wearing "jeans, a black T-shirt, denim shirt and sunglasses," the Telegraph reports. Prosecutors say that Davis had a collection of 750,000 personal passwords on his home network of 16 computers.
The Twitter account belonging to Anders Behring Breivik, the man who murdered over 90 people in Norway in twin attacks over a week ago, appears to have been hacked.
That tweet indicates that "hacktivist" group Anonymous is behind the hack.
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While the artist lofts on Kent St. in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn were buzzing with police activity this morning, their neighbors at the similar loft spaces on McKibbin St. had an unrelated run-in with the law yesterday. As part of the FBI raids that resulted in 16 arrests nationwide yesterday, a search for members of the hacker collective Anonymous brought authorities to the East Williamsburg building looking for one such online mischief-maker, but came up empty handed, Brooklyn Paper reports. "They were looking for the old tenants," Meaghan Ralph, 21, said. "They were trying to be nice when they realized I wasn't a criminal mastermind." Elsewhere, the cops were luckier, grabbing a bunch of young adults -- "Kids," says one of their attorneys -- whom the government wants to "throw under the bus."
A day after the online sect LulzSecurity pulled their own hack on Rupert Murdoch, members of the most the widely-known hacking collective Anonymous, from which LulzSec spun off, have been raided by the FBI. (There doesn't seem to be a direct connection other than the media attention currently being showered on all parties mentioned.) Three search warrants were executed in New York at the homes of young adults thought to be involved in the internet mischief that took down websites for Visa, PayPal and more, Fox News reports. But the group isn't scared, at least publicly. "It doesn't matter how many people the 'FBI' arrest," one member tweeted today. "Whether they are core members or not. #anonymous have started something unstoppable." As a matter of fact, Anonymous claims to be in possession of emails from News International servers -- the very News Corp. properties in hot water over the ongoing phone hacking scandal in the UK. 
Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation boss currently embroiled in a rapidly spreading phone hacking scandal, got hacked himself today. Before it crashed from traffic, the website for his British newspaper The Sun was redirecting automatically to a replica of The Sun homepage (as seen above) featuring the headline [sic], "Media moguls body discovered." The "report" reads, "Rupert Murdoch, the controversial media mogul, has reportedly been found dead in his garden, police announce," and blames "a large quantity of palladium," which Murdoch supposedly ingested "before stumbling into his famous topiary garden late last night, passing out in the early hours of the morning." LulzSec, the hacker group, is claiming responsibility. 
With their popularity (or at least ubiquity) at an all-time high, the hacktivist group Anonymous still can't play nice with others, but it's not their fault -- at least in their own estimation. Google banned the online mischief-makers from the new social network Google+, where they had created a "Your Anon News" page, because "some of the posted content violates...Community Standards." As a result, the hackers have set out to create AnonPlus, "a new social network where there is no fear of censorship, of blackout, nor of holding back," because they're sick of being excluded. 
Just days after the hacker group Anonymous announced a huge haul from the government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, the Pentagon admitted today that back in March some hackers (though not necessarily Anonymous) managed to steal 24,000 "sensitive Pentagon files during a single intrusion," the New York Times reports. Officials failed to name the culprit, but called them "foreign intruders." The admission came from Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III during a speech announcing a new Pentagon cyber strategy, hopefully better than the old one, which Lynn said had allowed "terabytes of data" to be taken from defense contractors over the past decade. With hacking making headlines, and in the word of the CIA's Leon Panetta, some 60,000 "new malicious software programs or variations...identified every day threatening our security, our economy and our citizens," this new strategy better be really ready. [NYT, WaPo] 
The internationally feared hacktivist group Anonymous produced a new mother lode of intel today, up for download on The Pirate Bay, that they're calling "Military Meltdown Monday: Mangling Booz Allen Hamilton." The contractor Booz Allen works, in Anonymous-speak, "on behalf of the U.S. federal government, foremost on defense and homeland security matters, and limited engagements of foreign governments specific to U.S. military assistance programs," and that, to hackers, is The Enemy, so Anonymous mined their servers for information, which they claim includes "roughly 90,000 military emails and password hashes," in addition to "maps and keys for various other treasure chests buried on the islands of government agencies, federal contractors and shady whitehat companies."
Hacker group du jour Lulz Security announced last night that it is disbanding. The shady, anonymous band of mischief-makers were behind hacks on Sony, the CIA, the FBI, and PBS, among other things; now they claim to be breaking up. After the jump, portions of their goodbye press release:
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