Nicholas Allegra lives with his parents in Chappaqua, New York. The tall, shaggy-haired and bespectacled 19-year old has been on leave from Brown University since last winter, looking for an internship. And in the meantime, he's been spending his days on a hobby that periodically sends shockwaves through the computer security world: seeking out cracks in the source code of Apple's iPhone, a device with more software restrictions than practically any computer on the market, and exploiting them to utterly obliterate its defenses against hackers.

Security experts have discovered the biggest series of cyber attacks to date, involving the infiltration of the networks of 72 organizations including the United Nations, governments and companies around the world.

Google touts the Chrome OS as being free from traditional security concerns like malware, but it's still vulnerable to entirely different kinds of attacks, two researchers from the firm WhiteHat Security told Black Hat attendees here today.

This week, serious hackers are gathering in Las Vegas to attend Def Con 19, which follows closely on the heels of the Black Hat Technical Security Training and Briefings

Forget computer viruses and worms. What's maybe the worst thing a hacker could do to your laptop? Access it remotely and shut it down -- or maybe even blow it up.

Hacking group Anonymous claims to have broken into the network of US government contractor Mantech and posted some NATO-related correspondence online.

The National Security Agency has a challenge for hackers who think they're hot stuff: Prove it by working on the "hardest problems on Earth." Computer hacker skills are in great demand in the U.S. government to fight the cyberwars that pose a growing national security threat -- and they are in short supply.

Anonymous hackers associated with the AntiSec movement have downed at least 70 law enforcement websites.The hackers also managed to extract "massive amounts" of confidential documents, including email spools, usernames, social security numbers, residential addresses, phone numbers, password dumps, classified documents, internal training files and informant lists.

When Google first started talking about its Google Chrome OS software a few years ago, one of the selling points was the promise that it would come with much better built-in security than other operating systems. Now, Chrome OS has only been commercially available for a few months, and security researchers have already figured out how to hack it.

According to a report in The Washington Post, the cost of the RSA hack which compromised the security of RSA's SecurID products was $66 million. The Post quoted a conference call with David Goulden, EMC Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, in which he stated that "We incurred an accrued cost associated with investigating the attack, hardening our systems and working with customers to implement our remediation programs."

A surge in high-profile hacker attacks this year is demonstrating the limits of an older generation of security software from Symantec Corp. and McAfee Inc., putting pressure on them to revamp their product lines.

As smartphones increasingly hold interesting data, attackers will target the devices using known vulnerabilities in common software packages.