Whether you call it spear phishing, spear fishing, or spearphishing, it’s a computer hack of your email in a way that’s targeted toward you, where you work, or a group you belong to. And, it masquerades as coming from someone you know and trust from your family, friends, workplace, or social group.

Cybersecurity experts have revealed that an army unit in China nicknamed “Advanced Persistent Threat 1” has been launching cyberattacks and data theft against American firms for some time. There seems to be enough evidence from the cybersecurity firm Mandiant to even pinpoint the origin of the attacks which have been linked to People’s Liberation Army Unit 61398.

Hunter Moore, the guy who invented revenge porn, is at it again and this time Internet hacktivist group Anonymous, specifically Kentucky Anonymous (@kyanonymous), has vowed to not let him get away with it in a campaign they’ve dubbed “Operation Hunt Hunter,” or, #OpHuntHunter. Despite the fact that he sold his original revenge porn website IsAnyoneUp.com, where users could submit naked pictures of others without consent, to an anti-bullying organization, and wrote what appeared to be a heartfelt letter apologizing for the mayhem his site caused, he told BetaBeat.com, “I literally had a half pound of cocaine on a fucking table with like 16 of my friends and we were busting up laughing taking turns writing this stupid letter.”

If you received an email from Twitter prompting you to change your password due to a possible hack, you’re not alone. It was a mistake from Twitter, who has issued a statement explaining what happened.

With one simple tweet, “#tangodown godaddy.com…Hello everyone who wanna me to put 99% of the global Internet in #tangodown?” one lone hacker, with the Twitter handle, “AnonymousOwn3r,” took down internet giant GoDaddy.com, causing an outage to the GoDaddy site, 1000s, if not millions, of sites that have GoDaddy-hosted sites, and their DNS, GoDaddy hosted e-mail accounts, and GoDaddy phone service. #tangodown is taken from a military term, meaning a target was successfully attacked. Hackers also use it when it means that a website has been taken offline.

Are smart meters (or as some call them “smartmeters”) the next great energy saver, or are they a privacy risk for someone hacking your wifi, Internet, or electricity usage data? Maybe both. Some are calling them a great way to save energy and money on our monthly energy bills, some are saying they are a sign that big brother is tightening his grasp, but either way, smart meters are stirring up some serious controversy. From public meetings in Vermont, to gun-toting homeowners chasing utility company workers who are aiming to install smart meters off their property, these tiny little devices have not arrived quietly.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has fined game developer RockYou.com $250,000 for, among other things, failing to adequately secure their customers’ user data. While the FTC slammed Rock You for COPPA (the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act rule) violations, in part because RockYou collected information from children under the age of 13 without parental consent, the Feds made a point of noting that “the company’s security failures put users’ including children’s personal information at risk” while at the same time claiming that they had adequate security measures in place. Adequate security measures our foot! They stored their user data in plain – i.e. unencrypted – text! The FTC settlement and fine follows a 2 year investigation into the hacking of RockYou servers in 2009 which exposed the date of 32 million users.

Aaron Swartz, a co-creator of RSS , open access advocate, and author of the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto, and now a researcher at Harvard, has been arrested for hacking into the JSTOR system. JSTOR, which stands for “Journal Storage”, is a system that archives academic journals, and makes them available to institutions and, in a more limited version, to the public.

Twitter is aflame with calls for boycotts of Rupert Murdoch, his ‘News of the World’, ‘News of the World’s’ parent company, ‘News International’, and other Murdoch holdings, as the investigation of News of the World’s using a private detective, Glenn Mulcaire, to hack into the telephone voicemail of several young girls who had been murdered in the U.K. in 2002, and that of their families, moves into Parliament. The families of Milly Dowler, Holly Wells, and Jessica Chapman have all been informed by police that each of their telephone voicemail accounts may have been hacked, each within days of each girl’s disappearance, and each by Mulcaire, trying to get a scoop for News of the World. Among other things, Mulcaire is alleged to have hacked into Milly Dowler’s voicemail on her mobile phone, and deleted some messages, which caused Milly’s family to continue to hope that she might be found alive when she had already been murdered, and which interfered with the police investigation. Calls for Rebekah Brooks, head of News International, and a personal friend of British Prime Minister David Cameron, to step down are escalating, putting the Prime Minister in an awkward position, particularly as his Communications Director, Andy Coulson, also formerly of News of the World, has already been forced to resign his position with the Prime Minister.

Earlier this month, the NATO Rapporteur (and we explain what that is) released a draft report addressing, among other things, the scope and impact of the leaking of the Wikileaks documents by Private Bradley Manning, the threats and actions by “hacktivists” (activist hackers engaging in “hacktivism”), including the hacker collective known as “Anonymous”, and what counter-measures NATO and other such bodies might take.

Lots of you are asking lots of questions about the Sony PlayStation Network (“How was the Sony Play Station Network taken down?”, “Who hacked the the Sony PlayStation Network?”, “Is it true that it was done with rooted Sony PSP handhelds?”, and, perhaps most importantly, “Is the Sony PSN secure now?” To bring you up-to-date, if you are scratching your head right now, first, the Sony PlayStation Network (referred to in shorthand as the “PSN”) was taken down last month in a concerted cyber attack which, at first Sony claimed was down due to “maintenance” but, eventually, they admitted that a hacking attack had taken them down. The hacker or hackers also caused Sony’s Qriocity services to go down. Oh, and wait – it also extended to the Sony Online Entertainment network. In short, if you have ever completed any transaction online with Sony, you need to treat your identity and credit card information as compromised.

As Google threatens to pull completely out of China, following allegations that the hack attacks against Google, code named “Operation Aurora” and first disclosed by Google last month, originated at two Chinese universities with strong governmental ties, the Chinese government is trying their own brand of shaping the Internet – by encouraging its citizens to send “red text messages”, also being referred to as “red snippets” and even “red jokes” (although they are not jokes). The Chinese term actually translates as “Red Duan” – ‘duan’ relating to measurement, such as a piece or stretch of time – in other words, a red era. According to authorities in China, the red text message – or red snippet – is intended to facilitate “the spirit of Chinese culture for an Internet age” and to combat the invasion of American culture. In the meantime, Google contemplates pulling out of China altogether after their discoveries in the wake of the Operation Aurora hacks, unless China agrees to allowing uncensored search.

A plague of rogue Facebook applications that are stealing user credentials – such as usernames and passwords – has been sweeping Facebook in the past week. The phishing Facebook apps work the same way that many other applications do – including sending an email to your Facebook friends, with links to click on, and when you type in your username and password, BAM! Your login credentials have been stolen.

If you use Gmail, and also use Facebook, it can be very easy for someone to password crack and access your Gmail account using Gmail’s recover password retrieval feature. This is because Gmail’s access password recovery feature allows anybody to guess the answer to your “forgot password” reset security question. And if the answer to your forgotten password reset security question happens to be information easily gleaned from your Facebook account (or some other social network information), then password hacking your Gmail account is as easy as typing in that password protection answer. (And we use the term “password protection” loosely.)

A new hotel network security study by Cornell University entitled “Hotel Network Security: A Study of Computer Networks in U.S. Hotels” has proven that using the wireless Internet – and even cabled Internet – at your hotel is almost always inherently insecure and unsafe.