EA studio DICE is warning players that they should avoid playing the beta of the upcoming modern-day shooter Battlefield 3 on unofficial servers, noting that doing so could compromise their accounts. Last week, Battlefield 3's server files were leaked onto the internet, opening up players to a large amount of unofficial servers for the game's ongoing beta test on PC. Using these leaked files lets those who want to run a server to adjust player counts from 32 to 100, among other things.

Sony did not break Australia’s Privacy Act during the PlayStation Network cyber attack, ruled Australia's Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim. Pilgrim’s report, released today, said that the Commission found "no evidence that Sony intentionally disclosed any personal information to a third party." Pilgrim said that he was satisfied that Sony Australia took reasonable steps to protect its customers’ personal information, including encrypting credit card information and ensuring appropriate security measures were in place.

Infinity Ward's creative strategist Robert Bowling says that the studio has learned some hard lessons about online cheating from previous Call of Duty games, and is taking extraordinary measures to make sure that there is little (or at least less) of it in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. To that end, Bowling says that MW3 will have dedicated teams monitoring online activity and dealing with anyone foolhardy enough to cheat.

A series of takedowns by law enforcement around the world may be taking its toll on the hacking group LulzSec. DailyTech claims that a number of recent police raids have seen the heart of the organization torn out. The first major arrest was LulzSec's chief ‘Topiary’ in the Shetland Islands, who is currently in jail awaiting trial. Recently five UK residents were detained, including supposed LulzSec leader ‘Kayla’.

The FBI announced that it has arrested a member of LulzSec for his part in a series of computer attacks against "the computer systems of Sony Pictures Entertainment." LulzSec also hacked a number of online games including EVE-Online, and The Escapist, but the FBI only mentioned its most notorious security breach.. The announcement was made jointly by André Birotte Jr., the United States Attorney in Los Angeles; and Steven Martinez, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office.

When you have an account for a service that keeps your credit card information on file, you hope that the company in question would provide you with some security, and when security fails, you pray that they will do what's right for the customer, but that doesn't always happen. In fact, sometimes companies do nothing at all to help you.

Codemasters and AMD have confirmed that over three million digital vouchers for Steam have been stolen for DiRT 3. According to a report from Industry Gamers (citing a Steam forum post), hackers used an .htaccess exploit that allowed them to gain access to an .sql database containing the codes. Those codes were meant to be used for a future AMD graphics card promotion.

British police have arrested two men yesterday as part of a what is being called a trans-Atlantic investigation into cyber attacks committed by hacking groups Anonymous and LulzSec. According to a C&VG report, Scotland Yard has confirmed that it picked up two men (one 24-year-old, and another 20-year-old) from two separate UK addresses. Law enforcement took the men into custody and seized a computer.

According a report on the mostly positive web site Care2, "animal activists" (hacktivist?) have hacked a dog fighting game that was removed from the Android Marketplace in April of this year for being offensive.

Nokia's community pages have been temporarily closed and replaced with a company statement following a security breach over the weekend. The online community used by developers that make Nokia phone apps has been hacked and the company warned its members that their personal information, including dates of birth and email addresses may have been stolen. For now, the service has been shut down while Nokia investigates. No one has claimed responsibility for the security breach at this time.

Apple has hired the man responsible for creating a website that allowed visitors to jailbreak their iPhones by simply clicking a link. The 19-year-old hacker, Nicholas Allegra (who goes by the alias "comex") announced via Twitter that Apple has hired him as an intern.

Last week at the DefCon hacking conference in Las Vegas there were some unfamiliar faces wandering around the event: teens and children. For the first time since it was founded 18 years ago, DefCon has opened its doors to young people ages 8 to 16. Parents who regularly attend the event were delighted about the news. All of the young attendees had to be accompanied by an adult, and some of the most difficult competitions were geared toward the young participants. Those competitions included lock-picking and finding the weak points in popular software and computer hardware.

Hacking groups Anonymous and LulzSec are doing themselves a disservice with random attacks and need to get more focused in order to accomplish their goals, according to a panel of computer security experts that convened during the DefCon hacker conference in Las Vegas last week.

The New York Times is reporting that minions of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il have found an interesting way of earning some much needed cash - MMO's. According to South Korean authorities, their neighbor to the North has created an army of young hackers and unleashed them on South Korea's most popular MMORPG's. This group is finding ways to exploit systems, gather in-game credits and convert it all back to cold hard cash.

South African newspaper Beeld is reporting that an unnamed man has been arrested for jailbreaking the PlayStation 3 in Parktown, Johannesburg today. This marks the first time someone has been arrested for such a crime in the country. The raid was conducted by the South African Police Service's Commercial Crime Unit, after receiving criminal complaints from the South African Federation Against Copyright Theft (SAFACT). Members of the police were assisted by the South African Revenue Service (SARS) Computer Forensics Lab.

At the annual Black Hat hacker convention that happened in Las Vegas this week Sony earned a dubious distinction of the security breach that took several of its services down for nearly two months. The awards are called "Pwnies" and - unless you are a hacker - you don’t want to be "honored" with on. Sony earned the "Most Epic Fail" award for the massive security breach that brought down the PlayStation Network and related services for nearly two months earlier this year.

Later this week in Las Vegas the hacking experts and security researchers will converge on Las Vegas for the annual Black Hat conference, and when they are done discussing hacking techniques and security breaches, they'll hand out awards for the best and worst security called the "Pwnie Awards." Sony is a leading contender for one particular award this year - for obvious reasons.

Youness Alaoui, known better by his online persona "KaKaRoTo" and for being the first man to develop modified firmware for the PS3, sits down for an interview with PlayStation LifeStyle to talk about the PS3, piracy, black hat hackers, and whether Sony owns its system or consumers do. Alaoui, who describes himself as a software engineer of Moroccan origin currently living in Canada, says that his passions are programming and open source development, which he has been doing for over 10 years.

Reuters is reporting that the FBI today raided six locations in New York and conducted several searches in California on Tuesday as part of a sweeping investigation of the Internet hacktivist group Anonymous. The targets of the raids in New York included a residence in Brooklyn and five other locations on Long Island. According to the report, these homes were searched for computers and other related equipment suspected of being used by members of the group to commit various cyber crimes.

FBI spokesman Tim Flannelly, said the searches in New York were "in relation to an ongoing investigation" of Anonymous. At least one laptop was removed from one home, but no arrests were made in any of the New York locations. Meanwhile on the other side of the country, FBI agents in California were conducting what they called "law enforcement actions" in the San Francisco Bay Area but did not say if anyone was arrested.

id Software revealed that its QuakeCon forums have been hacked and warned users that they may want to change their login information to avoid any hassles:

"In recent days, a hacker carried out an unlawful intrusion of the old forums.quakecon.org site, compromising usernames and passwords," the company said on the QuakeCon website.

"While we have taken appropriate steps to protect the new forums from attack, we recommend anyone using their old credentials on another site to change their passwords immediately."

"We regret any inconvenience this may have caused, and suggest you migrate to the new forums - which will be live shortly - to discuss QuakeCon 2011."

Sony has decided to extended its offer of free identity theft protection for PlayStation Network users in North America. The company announced that it is extending the AllClear ID Plus Identity Theft Protection program at no cost until the end of July. This protection will expire approximately one year after the user has registered for the program.

Apparently some users have been slow to sign up for it, or Sony is simply extending the program opt-in out of courtesy to its PSN users. The company offered the plan after the PlayStation Network came back online - two and half months after hackers breached security and forced the company to take its services down to make them more secure.

Sony is expected to announce AllClear ID Plus protection for users in Canada and Latin America sometime soon.

Source: Digital Spy

Square Enix is ticked off that its new Deus Ex game has been leaked and it is taking some individuals in Italy to task for it. The company has filed a lawsuit against unnamed Italian individuals who allegedly crashed an invite-only preview of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, then somehow managed to download the game and distribute it online.

A new survey conducted by MCV UK finds that a majority of gamers in the United Kingdom believe that the never-ending stream of security breaches has seriously hurt consumer confidence. While hacking groups like Lulz Security may be retreating from attacking game-related websites and services, gamers surveyed say that the damage is already done.

MCV surveyed 633 UK gamers who use digital services such as PlayStation Store, iTunes, Steam, and other digital distribution. They found that 34 percent had doubt that most publishers are capable of protecting the personal data of users. Another 20 percent said that they don’t trust download services at all.

George "Geohot" Hotz has taken a job at social networking giant Facebook, according to multiple reports and multiple sources. But the most telling evidence that he has been working as a software engineer for the company since May 9 is his own Facebook page where he lists "Facebook" as his current employer.

Hotz is best known for jailbreaking the iPhone and then the PlayStation 3. In the case of the latter, he did this to re-enable the use of Linux via the "OtherOS" feature of the PlayStation 3. Sony was not pleased and sued the hacker. Ultimately Sony and Hotz settled that dispute, with most of the terms undisclosed to the public. The only thing Hotz said publically was that he made a pact with the company to no longer engage in hacking the PS3 and to not share any further information on his work in that regard.

Source: GamePro

Late last week hacking group Lulz Security announced that they were all done hacking websites, servers and game services. But before the group said its final bon voyage it committed one more act on Saturday: they released a 500MB torrent file containing all kinds of data stolen from various places. The most notable data from the file is from the beta of Battlefield Heroes. We assume the data is old.

Hacking group Lulsec announced that it has ended its 50 day cyber attack operation and will now disappear from existence.

"For the past 50 days, we've been disrupting and exposing corporations, governments, often the general population itself, and quite possibly everything in between, just because we could," the group wrote in a message uploaded to The Pirate Bay file sharing website on Saturday.

"It is time to say bon voyage," the message concluded. "We must now sail into the distance."

The Lulz farewell also claimed that the group was comprised of six members and that it was always the plan to run a 50 day hacking free-for-all and then stop. The Lulz claimed responsibility for attacking various web sites and services including Sony Pictures, Nintendo, The Escapist, Eve Online, Bethesda, Epic Games, League of Legends, the Central Intelligence Agency, the US Senate, and the Arizona Department of Public Safety.

On June 14 BioWare informed forum users that its Neverwinter Nights forums had been hacked and forum accounts were likely compromised. That happened on June 14. On June 23 the company offered an update on the situation and an apology to users for the inconvenience. The update was posted on the Bioware Social Network and penned by Aaryn Flynn - Studio GM, BioWare Edmonton VP, Electronic Arts:

Lulsec hacker Ryan Cleary may not have had an involvement in attacking videogame-related targets (at least there's no evidence of it yet), but he has managed to pull gaming into the mix. The 19-year-old apparently told his mother (while attacking various websites) that he was "playing videogames." Cleary, who was outed publicly by Anonymous for some IRV server taker-over shenanigans, proved to be a convincing liar.

Speaking to The Mirror, Cleary's mother and brother said that they were shocked when Ryan was arrested for hacking.

They couldn't believe that he was a member of hacking group LulzSec, which has claimed responsibility for online attacks of the CIA, PBS, Nintendo and Sony. The group has publicly said that he is not a member, for the record.

Mother Rita Cleary also said that her son had lived his life "online" and assumed he was playing games.

The Senate Commerce Committee has scheduled a hearing on privacy and data security for June 29, but has not revealed the witness list at this time. Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) has held several hearings this year on privacy issues, cybersecurity, and do-not-track legislation. He has also pressed the Federal Trade Commission and App store owners such as Google and Apple to do more about protecting the privacy of children when it comes to mobile apps.

German PlayStation 3 coder Alexander'Graf_Chokolo' Egorenkov said that because he doesn't have the money to fight Sony he expects to spend some time in jail. Egorenkov was targeted by Sony last year for hacking PS3 code to re-enable OtherOS on the console. Egorenkov was sued by Sony and forced to take all his material related to the hack offline. That site has been replaced by a donations page to help pay for his legal fees.

Speaking to supporters on his web site this week, Egorenkov said that his situation is looking bleak because he doesn't have the money to fight back: