Associated Press had its Twitter account hacked yesterday, and inaccurate tweets posted in its name caused panic and financial turmoil.

The tweets that came from the verified account declared that there had been two explosions in the White House, and that President Barack Obama had been injured.

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“ Password-based security mechanisms — which can be cracked, reset, and socially engineered — no longer suffice in the era of cloud computing.”

If you haven’t read Wired writer Mat Honan’s gut-wrenching play-by-play of how his entire digital life was evaporated in the matter of hours, as his Twitter, iPhone, Mac, Gmail and iCloud were all hit, do yourself a favour and Instapaper it.

Or, if you’re too busy to read the whole article, I’ve created a quick-and-dirty summary that retraces the hacker’s steps and highlights some steps we can take to protect ourselves from similar attacks. Read More »

Yahoo and Formspring became the latest victims of major password-hacking incidents last week, following high-profile incidents at LinkedIn, eHarmony and Last.fm in June. The LinkedIn breach alone resulted in 6.5m hashed passwords being published on a hacking forum.

We are seeing the frequency of high-profile hacking incidents escalate and I can only see that pattern continuing to build. In some cases the hackers will be motivated only by a desire to expose what they regard as unacceptable weaknesses in the online defences of governments or organisations, however, in others cases, criminal hackers will have less altruistic intentions. Read More »

A huge blow for LinkedIn if the story breaking today is correct. A user in a Russian internet forum claims to have hacked the professional social network LinkedIn and stolen the account details of almost 6.5 million accounts.

According to reports the user has uploaded 6,458,020 hashed passwords, but as yet no usernames. Read More »