Hacker Group

As North Korea continues to threaten the U.S. and South Korea with war rhetoric, hackers have taken over the country's social media accounts and many of its websites. North Korea's Twitter and Flickr accounts began pushing content Thursday that is unlike what the two social media accounts normally do, making it appear that the North Korean social media accounts had been compromised. That was followed by Anonymous, a decentralized hacker group, taking responsibility for hijacking the accounts.

The Los Angeles Police Department is denying claims by online hacker group Anonymous that it had attacked and brought down the department's website. "Anonymous Operation USA | Target: DOWN | http://www.LAPDonline.org  | #Anonymous #OpUSA #FTP #Revolution," the group tweeted . But LAPD Sgt. Frank Preciado was quick to refute the group's claims. "No they didn't," he told the Los Angeles Times. PHOTOS: 10 tech companies to watch in 2013 Anonymous's claim of an attack came after the group began using a Twitter account to criticize and mock the department's manhunt of Chris Dorner, the former LAPD officer wanted in the killings of three people.

Apple, responding to a hacker group's claim that the group stole 12 million Apple device identification numbers from an FBI laptop, denied Wednesday providing such a list to the agency. "The FBI has not requested this information from Apple, nor have we provided it to the FBI or any organization," Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller said. Apple's statement adds to the mystery surrounding the alleged list, which FBI has denied having. A hacker group called AntiSec, which is associated with the group known as Anonymous, has maintained that it stole 12 million device IDs from an FBI agent's computer.

LulzSec Reborn, a hacker group, has claimed to have obtained the credentials of 10,000 Twitter accounts after hacking a third-party app, but according to Twitter, all the accounts have remained secure. The group of hackers, which is based off the hacker group LulzSec that arose last summer, posted a note on PasteBin over the weekend saying it had posted the passowords and other credentials of Twitter accounts by hacking an app called TweetGif.  LulzSec Reborn, which has remained quiet since hacking MilitarySingles.com in March, posted a user table from the app. The table includes users' Twitter handles, passwords, actual names, locations, bios, avatars, the tokens they enter to activate the app and their last tweet as well, according to PCMag . But although the hackers posted the information and it remains online, Twitter says no security breaches have occurred, attributing the security to TweetGif's use of OAuth, which is a way to connect users' accounts to Twitter.

BlueToad, a digital publishing company in Florida, said a stolen list of 1 million Apple device IDs came from its computers, not the FBI's as an Internet hacker group has claimed. The company's CEO and president, Paul DeHart, said BlueToad took a look at the stolen data that had been posted online, compared it with the company's data and found that there was a "significant match. " "At that point we knew conclusively that it was our data that'd been compromised," he said in a phone interview, adding that the company was the victim of a cyber attack a week and a half ago. DeHart said BlueToad develops apps for magazine, newspaper and book publishers.  "For now we'd like to avoid disclosing any of our clients," he said.

GoDaddy said it is working on resolving a problem that has caused many of the sites it hosts to go offline. "Status Alert: Hey, all. We're aware of the trouble people are having with our site. We're working on it," the company tweeted Monday morning. Some GoDaddy sites began experiencing problems after 10:00 a.m. PDT, and a quick search of "GoDaddy" on Twitter indicated that the issues are likely extensive. Many users are sending tweets saying all of their websites are down.

The fast food twitterverse erupted in a frenzy Monday morning when the Burger King Twitter account was hacked. Someone call the Twitter po po. The Burger King feed was innundated with tweets mentioning McDonald's and the account profile read: "Burger King official twitter account. Just got sold to McDonalds because the whopper flopped = FREEDOM IS FAILURE. McDonalds.com. In a hood near you... " Earlier Monday, if you searched for the King's Twitter account, the McDonald's name would show up. Now, when you click on the profile, it says, "Sorry, that user is suspended.

Despite the long holiday break, hackers kept up their attacks, targeting Apple Inc. and Fox News before hacking PayPal Inc. on Tuesday in the latest rash of cyber strikes. As America celebrated its independence, hackers took control of Fox News' Twitter account and early Monday morning tweeted six messages to @foxnewspolitics' 34,000 followers stating that the president had been killed, according to Fox News. The tweets, which were noticed about 2 a.m., were deleted after Twitter suspended the account about seven hours later and returned control of it to Fox News.

The breach in Citigroup Inc.'s online security, affecting more customers than originally thought, shows that financial institutions still are struggling to block hackers and still are loath to explain to customers and the public what thieves took. Hackers obtained information on 360,083 credit accounts of North America customers in an attack last month, Citigroup said late Wednesday. That's about 80% more than first estimated. The giant New York banking company, parent company of Citibank, downplayed the break-in, saying its security team identified the attack May 10 and "immediately rectified" the situation.

A hacker organization on Monday released e-mails in which a former Bank of America Corp. employee asserts the company is hiding foreclosure information from regulators. The posting by a member of a group known as Anonymous includes e-mails in which an employee of Balboa Insurance Group in Irvine raises questions about removing from the record documents that were sent out in error. The e-mails don't indicate the loans have foreclosure issues. A Bank of America spokesman said the former Balboa employee stole documents from the company.