Italian police arrested four suspected hackers Friday, accusing them of having taken control of the Italian branch of the Anonymous network.

Let's not mince words: Cyberattacks suck. Whether criminals are hacking our passwords, or Anonymous is simply making a statement, the disruptions and data breaches exact a heavy toll in terms of time, money, and security. For example, after the Associated Press Twitter account was hacked and bogus news was posted about an attack on the White House, the U.S. stock market took a nosedive.

Twist in the planned U.S. attack is to target small banks, which are unlikely to have the same level of sophistication in their defenses

One of the US’s critical military and espionage contractors QinetiQ North America (QNA) was successfully pillaged for huge amounts of top-secret know-how by the infamous Chinese ‘Comment Crew’ or PLA 61398 hacking group in a campaign stretching over years, Bloomberg has reported.

April 22, 2013: the day the Internet at large took a look at the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) and yawned.

As 2012 comes to a close, it's time to reflect on the security trends of the year with this look at the hottest security slideshows of 2012.

The first half of 2012 was pretty bad - from the embarrassing hack of a conversation between the FBI and Scotland Yard to a plethora of data breaches - and the second half wasn't much better, with events including Symantec's antivirus update mess and periodic attacks from hactivists at Anonymous.

Perhaps it was an omen of what was to come when the city of San Francisco on New Year's Eve 2010 couldn't get a backup system running in its Emergency Operations Center because no one knew the password.