A Department of Justice spokeswoman has revealed that several unauthorized users gained access to a server that hosts the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ website. You can probably guess who’s taking responsibility: Your friendly neighborhood collection of loosely-associated self-proclaimed hacktivists, Anonymous. Anonymous claims that among the spoils of the hack, there are internal emails and a full database dump which may contain data the Bureau has been collecting about cybersecurity incidents.

Yesterday, The Pirate Bay was suffering widespread outages that were reportedly the result of a DDoS attack from an unknown source. The whole situation was quite strange, considering the site didn’t seem to have any enemies that would resort to DDoSing. Now, the outage is over and Twitter user @AnonNyre has claimed responsibility, implying the whole thing is some kind of crusade against Anonymous. If that doesn’t quite make sense to you, don’t worry; it doesn’t quite make sense in general.

It’s unclear what happened, but a list of thousands of Twitter usernames and passwords has been published on Pastebin. The tip-off about the hack came from Airdemon, which attributes the attack to lowercase-a ”anonymous hackers.” The post, in addition to linking the Pastebin pages, recommends users check for their own names, and suggests Twitter’s lack of security is to blame for the leak. Twitter has pushed out password updates to affected accounts and notes that many of the accounts listed are duplicates, or spam bots that have already been suspended.

Not too long ago, the High Court ruled U.K. ISPs must block access to The Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay responded, suggesting easily implementable methods to get around the block, but that didn’t stop Virgin Media from complying with the court order and swiftly enacting the block. In response to that, hackers attacked the Virgin Media website, getting it taken offline for a short while. Somewhat surprisingly, The Pirate Bay spoke out against the attack.

If you don’t want people to be able to suss out your IP at will, you might want to be careful how you use popular VOIP service Skype. A recently uncovered exploit makes it possible — and pretty easy — to figure out the IP of any given Skype user so long as you know their user name and so long as they’re currently logged on to the service. While your IP address isn’t quite the same as, say, your address or pictures of you in your underwear or something, it can be used to track you  – and you specifically — down. Of course, if you ask the RIAA, you can always just argue that your IP isn’t really you.

As if there wasn’t enough video game hacking out there, the U.S. Navy just arranged for a little more, and paid over $100,000 for it. No, they’re not looking to boost their kill-death ratios in MW:3 by using wall-hacks or something. Instead, they’re hoping these hired hackers will be able to help them intercept useful inteligence that is being communicated by console messaging services. That’s right: They want to eavesdrop on terrorists who discuss their plans over a heated match of Halo: Reach.

Money may not be able to buy happiness, but it sure can buy a lot of other things. Google has recently been exploiting this fact by using it to buy hackers, essentially. After offering $1 million in prizes to potential hackers as a part of their Pwnium contest, Google is going to have to pay up, about which I’m sure they’re happy. On the very first day, Russian University student Sergey Glazunov cracked Chrome wide open, snagging a $60,000 prize, marking the first time Chrome has been hacked in a public competition. He wasn’t the only one to pull it off either.

A lot has changed since last summer when the Lulz were abundant and the hacking was easy. LulzSec, insane mascot of Internet chaos, sailed off into the sunset, returned, and faded away again. Anonymous continued to pepper government sites with scattered DDoS attacks, though with less and less frequency, and the affected government organizations continued to swat at their Anonymous attackers, with increasing success. But there was more to it than all that, something that has only just come to light. It seems that Sabu, the figurehead of LulzSec, actually defected late in the summer of 2011 and has been working for the FBI ever since, and now it’s become clear that he played an important role in the latest series of hacker arrests.

With Chrome gaining more and more of the world’s browser share, it’s important that it be secure; important enough that Google is going to be offering prizes totaling $1 million to hackers who can uncover exploits of varying intensity in their popular browser. The prizes are being offered alongside the sixth annual Pwn2Own contest where hackers will compete to use and abuse Internet browsers. Those taking on the Windows 7 version of Chrome stand to win individual prizes of $20,000, $40,000, or $60,000 depending on the l33tn335 of their 5k1llz.

During this recent spell of Internet-endangering-legislation craziness, everyone’s favorite loosely organized group of Guy Fawkes-mask-wearing hackers, Anonymous, has been relatively quiet aside from some (alleged) empty threats thrown Sony’s way and a flurry of DDOS attacks following the MegaUpload takedown. Now, Anonymous has kicked it up a notch and leaked the spoils of one of their more impressive hacks to date: Audio of a conference call between the FBI and the Scotland Yard.