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"Facebook said on Thursday it had taken down about 200 accounts run by a group of hackers in Iran as part of a cyber-spying operation that targeted mostly US military personnel and people working at defense and aerospace companies. The social media company said the group, dubbed "Tortoiseshell" by security experts, used fake online personas to connect with targets, build trust - sometimes over the course of several months - and drive them to other sites, where they were tricked into clicking malicious links that would infect their devices with spying malware."

"Hackers have attacked networks in a number of countries including data centres in Iran, where they left the image of a US flag on screens along with a warning: "Don't mess with our elections", the Iranian IT ministry said on Saturday. "The attack apparently affected 200,000 router switches across the world in a widespread attack, including 3,500 switches in our country," the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology said in a statement carried by Iran's official news agency IRNA"

"Apple has warned the UK government that proposals in the draft Investigatory Powers Bill to demand technology firms weaken encryption would make the data of millions of law-abiding citizens less secure and make it easier for hackers to "cause chaos"."

"Inoculating people from misinformation and tackling the "infodemic" are key to fighting the coronavirus. Tang, Taiwan's first transgender government minister and a self-described "civic hacker", has done this by fostering digital democracy: using technology to encourage civic participation and build consensus. Tang has also quashed faked news by implementing a 2-2-2 "humour over rumour" strategy. A response to misinformation is provided within 20 minutes, in 200 words or fewer, alongside two fun images. Early in the pandemic, for example, people were panic-buying toilet paper because of a rumour that it was being used to manufacture face masks; supplies were running out. So, the Taiwanese premier, Su Tseng-chang, released a cartoon of him wiggling his bum, with a caption saying: "We only have one pair of buttocks." It sounds silly, but it went viral. Humour can be far more effective than serious fact-checking."

"Dubbed typosquatting, the idea is simple (if devious): A hacker registers a domain that is close enough to a real site, like yourbanknarne.com, and puts up a clone of yourbankname.com. The unsuspecting victim goes to the wrong site by mistake, and enters their personal banking information. In doing so, they have inadvertently handed the digital keys to their account to a hacker. "

"The new documents reveal that a GCHQ unit dubbed the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group, or JTRIG, launched an operation called Rolling Thunder against the hacker collective in 2011. That operation included using DDoS attacks as well as malware to slow down the hackers and later identify them, as first reported by as reported by NBC News on Wednesday."

"According to the report, Twitter's security "problems" were only exacerbated by the push to remote work necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic. Like many other newly remote workers, Twitter's employees experienced tech problems working from home. Hackers were able to capitalize on this, tricking at least one Twitter employee into believing the hacker was a member of Twitter's IT team."

""Closer investigation by our team confirmed that hackers were carrying out a sustained and determined attack on all parliamentary user accounts in an attempt to identify weak passwords. These attempts specifically were trying to gain access to our emails. "

The battle for control of cyberspace is turning nasty, with young hackers, pirates and activists facing long prison sentences. We report from the frontline

"Re/code, a technology news website, was the first to float the North Korea theory last Friday. Citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter, it said: "Sony Pictures Entertainment is exploring the possibility that hackers working on behalf of North Korea, possibly operating out of China, may be behind a devastating attack that brought the studio's network to a screeching halt earlier this week … The sources stress that a link to North Korea hasn't been confirmed, but has not been ruled out, either.""