The data posted online includes the personal info for 180 users at Infragard, which is a private-public partnership between the FBI and U.S. businesses "designed to protect IT systems from hacker attacks and other intrusions."

Though encrypted, the Infragard passwords were also cracked. Of their wide reuse for personal email and other online services, LulzSec adds: "they should be considered imbeciles from this moment until their moment of death."

The group said they didn't have the resources to copy all the information found, but is posting "samples" to prove their authenticity. The group claims they could have taken more, but that would have taken "several more weeks."

"What's worse is that every bit of data we took wasn't encrypted. Sony stored over 1,000,000 passwords of its customers in plaintext, which means it's just a matter of taking it," reads the post. "This is disgraceful and insecure: they were asking for it."

State lawmakers have passed a groundbreaking measure that would make it a crime to use a friend's login - even with permission - to listen to songs or watch movies from services such as Netflix or Rhapsody.

Stealing $500 or less of entertainment would be a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail and a fine of $2,500. Theft with a higher price tag would be a felony, with heavier penalties.

The music industry has seen its domestic revenue plunge by more than half in 10 years, from $15 billion to $7 billion, he said.

Hackers in China have compromised personal e-mail accounts of hundreds of top US officials, military personnel and journalists, Google has said.

The fact that the victims were people with access to sensitive, even secret information, raises the possibility that this was cyber espionage, not cyber crime, our correspondent says.

The World Health Organization's cancer research agency says mobile phones are "possibly carcinogenic".

Ed Yong, head of health information at Cancer Research UK, said: "The WHO's verdict means that there is some evidence linking mobile phones to cancer but it is too weak to draw strong conclusions from.

The censorship comes after protests erupted in the region when an ethnic Mongolian shepherd was run over by an ethnic Han truck driver, according to human rights groups. Ethnic Mongolians in the region have taken to the streets, prompting authorities to declare martial law in some of the cities.

The Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center said on its website that China's most popular instant messenger service QQ, which helped organize the mass protests, has been shutdown in the region.

Defense contractor Lockheed Martin confirmed last night that the network problems it has been contending with during the last several days are the result of a "significant and tenacious attack" carried out against its network.

Going after the systems used by defense contractors to steal jet designs is one thing. Attacking systems like the power grid--deemed by the government to be "critical infrastructure," is quite another. It's the fear that these systems could come under attack just as readily as any other that keeps the government funding numerous cybersecurity efforts.

The U.S. Congress has approved a four-year extension of the Patriot Act despite warnings from senators that the Justice Department has twisted the 2001 law into a "secret" surveillance mechanism far broader than Americans realize.

At the moment, Udall said this week, the FBI can "collect business records on law-abiding Americans" who have no connection to terrorism. "We ought to be able to at least agree that the source of an investigation under Patriot Act powers should have a terrorist-related focus," he said. "If we can't limit investigations to terrorism, where do they end?"

Speaking on Wednesday at the opening of Microsoft's new Microsoft Asia-Pacific R&D Group headquarters in Beijing, Microsoft CEO said that the company earned revenue in China amounting to only five percent of that earned in the US, in spite of comparable sales of personal computers between the two countries. The reason for the difference? Piracy, unsurprisingly.

TMG's server was running a custom-written administration program coded in Delphi. It had the unusual security feature of not requiring any authentication at all, allowing anyone connecting to port 8500 to send commands to the server.

The update command connects to an FTP server, retrieves a file, and then executes it-all without authentication-and rather than connecting to a specific FTP server, it allows the server to be specified when the update command is given.

This could in turn allow the private networks used by TMG for sharing IP address information with the French authorities to be attacked and possibly compromised-a risk that led to the temporary cessation of data collection last week.