As 2011 draws to a close we wanted to take a look at computer and information security in the twelve months that have passed.

What will probably stick in most people’s minds is the Sony PlayStation Network and Qriocity hack, which resulted in an outage lasting 23 days. In other developments, hacktivist groups like Anonymous and LulzSec took to social media to further their causes, and mobile malware got more attention than ever before.

All in all, there’s no doubt that 2011 was a very busy year for IT security professionals.

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A significant number of iPhone owners have chosen to circumvent Apple’s default iPhone OS installation with a hacked version that lets them install applications from outside the App Store, have applications running in the background, and so on. It’s called, as you probably know, “jailbreaking”.

There are a lot of jailbroken iPhones out there. Exactly how many is hard to tell, but there are estimates that as many as 8.5% of all iPhones and iPod Touches are jailbroken. That number comes from Jay Freeman, founder of Cydia, a kind of alternative app store for jailbroken iPhones.

So where in the world is it most common to jailbreak your iPhone?

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It seems like every month there is some kind of news story about leaked emails. When emails never intended for the public eye are leaked, the consequences can be huge. People have lost their jobs, whole companies have been embarrassed, and in some cases the information revealed can even be dangerous.

Considering how easily emails can be leaked, it’s almost surprising we don’t hear about leaks more often. Here are a few famous examples of leaked emails and what their consequences were.

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URL shortening services have been around for a long time (TinyURL started back in 2002) but it wasn’t until Twitter started gaining momentum that they became widely popular. Now we have a TON of them, including the original TinyURL, Bit.ly, Is.gd, and many, many more.

We have all placed an enormous amount of trust in these services by using them to such a large extent. They offer a legitimate, highly useful service, but we should at least be aware of the flip side of the coin.

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Sometimes disagreements and conflicts spill over from real life to online, and sometimes people go completely overboard and launch cyber attacks on services or websites they dislike, doing their best to sabotage them and often causing some serious downtime.

This sabotage is often done using distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks) which send such extreme amounts of traffic to a website that it is effectively disabled.

This article takes a look at some high-profile examples of cyber attacks, how the attacked website was affected and why it was attacked (where this information is available). We also take a quick look at how these attacks are usually launched, what the long arm of the law is doing about it and how bad the punishment can actually get.

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Google is one of the best hacking tools out there. It may sound incredible, but relatively simple searches in Google and other search engines can dig out sensitive or even dangerous information about your site, your servers and your company. You want Google to index your site and make you visible and searchable. That part [...]

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