Defacement

Anonymous has found a new target. The hacktivist group has defaced some 500 Chinese business and government websites over the last week, a protest against the government's censorship practices.

Anonymous said Friday that it is responsible for temporarily defacing the website and Facebook account belonging to Sony Pictures.

A person supportive of the Occupy Wall Street movements sweeping the nation has hacked into the website belonging to the St. Louis mayor, defacing it and publicly exposing contact information and emails.

Hiding the facts behind a cyberattack only stands to benefit the criminal.

The home page of Harvard University was hacked by pro-Syria supporters in a "sophisticated" attack, but at least one security expert is skeptical of just how advanced the compromise could have been.

The Facebook page for Pfizer has returned online after it was compromised by hackers who posted remarks disparaging the pharmaceutical giant. U.K.-based group The Script Kiddies claimed responsibility with gaining control of Pfizer's Facebook page, which has nearly 30,000 followers, to post updates that called the company "corrupt" and "irresponsible." Once it retook control, Pfizer posted a message on the account saying it was "working with Facebook to understand what happened so we can guard against it in the future." The Script Kiddies, through its Twitter account, posted two screenshots of the defacement, done as part of the AntiSec movement recently announced by fellow hacktivist collectives Anonymous and LulzSec.

On the heels of successful infiltrations at PBS and Sony, a vigilante hacker collective has compromised the website of the Atlanta chapter of InfraGuard, an FBI partner organization.

There is a new cybervigilante group in town, and its name is LulzSec. Its technical ability became known over the weekend with the infiltration and subsequent defacement of PBS.org.

Despite its original intentions, Anonymous has defaced the website of the hate-spewing Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas.

Advocacy groups and independent media face a variety of damaging cyberattacks, and there is little they can do to stop them, a new study from Harvard University concludes.