A 41-slide NSA presentation has been leaked on a program called PRISM, which gives the spy agency “direct access” to the servers of the biggest Internet companies in the US, including Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo and Skype.
Internet activism has taken center stage throughout the Arab Spring, turning citizens with mobile phones into journalists, and Facebook and Twitter into engines of revolt. The hackers of the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) also consider themselves activists, fighting for a government to which – they believe – the fate of the country is tied. Their popularity has surged in the past few months, following a string of high-profile hackings, including cyberattacks on the Financial Times and the Associated Press.
Since at least 1997, the National Security Agency (NSA) has been responsible for developing ways to attack hostile computer networks as part of the growing field of Information Warfare (IW), according to a recently declassified internal NSA publication
News organisations around the world have been warned by social networking site Twitter to tighten security in the wake of several high profile hacks including The Guardian and Associated Press.
Spanish police have reportedly arrested a 35 year old Dutchman suspected of being behind the huge web attack at the end of March that affected a number of web services around the world.