China has pledged to punish hackers who attacked Google if there is evidence to prove it, but said it has yet to receive any complaint from the world’s top search engine.

Google sent shockwaves across business and political circles in January when it declared it would stop censoring Chinese search results, and threatened to pull out of China — the world’s largest online community with 384 million users at the end of last year — over hacking and censorship concerns.

Google had never filed a report to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology over the cyber attacks or sought negotiations, Vice Minister Miao Wei was quoted as saying by state news agency Xinhua late on Saturday.

Criminal hackers have penetrated the networks of almost 2,500 companies and government agencies in a coordinated campaign that began 18 months ago and continues to steal email passwords, login credentials, and other sensitive data to this day, a computer security company said.

As more organizations allow employees to use social media like Facebook and Twitter at work, cybercrime attacks on these networks have exploded, according to a report released Monday by IT security firm Sophos. Reports of malware and spam rose 70 percent on social networks in the last 12 months, the security survey reveals.

Microsoft Corp. took the unsual step of issuing an unscheduled fix Thursday for security holes in its Internet Explorer browser that played a role in the recent computer attacks that led Google to threaten to leave China.

A Nebraska man is expected to plead guilty next week to launching a cyber attack that shut down the Church of Scientology’s Web sites, federal prosecutors said Monday.

The Tor Project, a service that provides privacy and anonymity to Web users, said hackers broke into two of its servers and used the CPU and bandwidth to launch additional attacks.

hey are cloaked by pseudonyms and multiple addresses, but China’s legions of hackers were thrust into the spotlight last week after Google said it suffered a sophisticated cyber-attack emanating from China.

Hackers have released an application designed to thwart a Microsoft-packaged forensic toolkit used by law enforcement agencies to examine a suspect’s hard drive during a raid.
The hacker tool, dubbed DECAF, is designed to counteract the Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, aka COFEE. The latter is a suite of 150 bundled, off-the-shelf forensic tools that run [...]

(TELEGRAPH) There was growing speculation on Sunday that hackers working for the Russian secret service were responsible for the theft of controversial emails in the ‘Climategate’ scandal.
Thousands of emails, from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were first published on a small server in the city of Tomsk in [...]