Secret organizations in the network hackers staged provocation in the interests of the American and British intelligence services. 

Hired specialists under the supervision of the alliance Five Eyes distributed network false information to mislead and control the parties to the communication on the Internet. This was reported in the documents from the files of Edward Snowden. Special undercover units to track messages on the Internet, introduced in the discussion forums, social networking corresponded and threw false information to guide the users' opinions in a certain way. 

Star Wars’ most loyal copilot has gone to the dark side on our side of the galaxy, as Malware operating under the name ‘ChewBacca’ has stolen data on 49,000 payment cards from 45 retailers in 11 countries over a two month span.

According to RSA FirstWatch, the Security Division of EMC which exposed the malignant software, the virus started running in October and has so far gathered 24 million transaction details, mostly in the US, but also in Canada, Australia and Russia. This relatively new Trojan was dubbed ‘ChewBacca’ because an image of the iconoclastic Wookiie was featured on the login page of the server, which the hacking ring used to collect data from infected computers.

The Angry Birds site was defaced by hackers, the company behind the game has confirmed, after revelations that America's National Security Agency and the UK's GCHQ have been targeting the site's “leaky” user data.

An image employing the NSA logo and a “spying birds” caption replaced the official Angry Birds website for a brief time on Tuesday.

The hack was in response to the revelation that the Angry Birds apps, among others, were leaking personal data via advertising networks on which the UK and US intelligence agencies were spying.

Internet experts say huge chunks of sensitive web traffic have been routinely hijacked by hackers and diverted to foreign computers, compromising the data of victims in at least 150 cities worldwide.

Researchers at New Hampshire-based global internet intelligence company Renesys say that they’ve witnessed a complex type of Man-in-the-Middle attack occur on computer networks no fewer than 60 days this year already, the likes of which they say should never have happened. The method of attack exploits a vulnerability in the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP, and takes advantage of the fact that much of the information routed through the global system of networks.

Over 2 million passwords for popular social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as Google and Yahoo accounts have been stolen and posted online, with Russian social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki also featuring on the hitlist.

Internet security firm Trustwave exposed the extensive data hoard, saying in its blog that the responsible botnet – dubbed Pony – had harvested information from thousands of vulnerable computers on a global scale.

The information included login credentials, email addresses and passwords. In total, 1,580,000 website login credentials were stolen, alongside 320,000 email and 41,000 FTP accounts.

The NSA used ‘man in the middle’ hack attacks to impersonate Google and fool web users, leaks have revealed. The technique circumvents encryption by redirecting users to a copycat site which relays all the data entered to NSA data banks.

Brazilian television network Globo News released a report based on classified data divulged by former CIA worker Edward Snowden on Sunday. The report itself blew the whistle on US government spying on Brazilian oil giant Petrobras, but hidden in amongst the data was information the NSA had impersonated Google to get its hands on user data. 

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission issued a complaint on Wednesday against Internet-connected device maker Trendnet due to a security flaw in one of its webcams – a device marketed for home security and baby monitoring – that let hackers spy on people in their homes.

The complaint is the first issued by the FTC that concerns a device included in the category we know as the “Internet of Things.” But thanks to a specialized search engine for Internet-connected devices called Shodan, the FTC’s Trendnet complaint is likely only the beginning. Countless devices, ranging from webcams to electrical power plants, are insecurely connected to the Internet, making them vulnerable to hacker intrusions and other cyberattacks.