Stories by: Gregg Keizer

A group of hackers that hit the Church of Scientology's site earlier this year have apparently cracked the Yahoo Mail account belonging to Sarah Palin, the Republican nominee for US vice president, according to documents and screenshots posted on the Web.

Scammers have duped hundreds of people out of thousands of dollars each using bogus Olympic ticket-selling sites, and a security expert warned that more will follow.

The researcher whose speculation led to an early disclosure of information about a critical flaw in the Domain Name System (DNS), the Internet's traffic cop, wasn't the first to come close to the truth, said the security expert who found the bug and organized a massive patching effort.

Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard on Tuesday unveiled free tools to help Web developers and site administrators defend against the rapidly growing number of SQL injection attacks that aim to hijack legitimate sites.

A security company on Friday asked for help cracking an encryption key central to an extortion scheme that demands money from users whose PCs have been infected by malware.

Microsoft's Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) ships with an out-of-date version of Adobe's Flash Player that's vulnerable to recently-spotted attacks, according to Microsoft's support documentation.

The Web site for the Phoenix Mars Mission, NASA's most recent arrival on the Red Planet, was hacked over the weekend by a Turkish crew, according to a defacement database.

A botnet is now using a SQL-injection attack tool designed to hack legitimate Web sites, a move meant to add more hijacked PCs to its collection, according to a security researcher.

Microsoft Tuesday patched six vulnerabilities, most marked "critical," in Windows, Word, Publisher and its anti-virus software.

More than half a million Web sites have been compromised in a new round of attacks that hacked domains in order to infect unsuspecting users' PCs with a variety of malware, a security researcher said today.

A group of security researchers Wednesday said they have infiltrated one of the world's biggest botnets and can snatch control of compromised machines from the hackers.