Terry Childs will be sentenced on June 14 after being found guilty of denial-of-service charges after a series of computer security violations in 2008.

Childs, reportedly in despite with city officials, breached internal security procedures to lock city officials out of their own networks and refused to disclose passwords.

Before the incident, Childs had spent much of his time building and managing the city’s FiberWAN infrastructure, Childs responded to the dispute by locking down the network, preventing management from accessing the network.

The resulting dispute saw Childs arrested and San Francisco left without access to around 60% of the city’s stored data. Childs argued that he was protecting the system from possible damage at the hands of fellow administrators unfamiliar with the FiberWAN deployment.

More than a week after the crisis began, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsome was able to defuse the situation by visiting Childs in jail and retrieving the needed passwords to regain access.

The website of the British right-leaning publication was defaced with a pro-Romanian message from R.N.S: Romanian National Security, displaying anger at how the paper had covered a story about gypsies and the link that the paper made between “gypsies” and “Romanians”.

The message, which appeared on the “Short Breaks” and Wine and Dine sections of the site, included a picture of a Romanian flag, some comments in Romanian and the remark in English at the bottom that “Guess what, gypsies aren’t romanians, morons.” It also links to a Russian site which plays an MP3 called The Lonely Shepherd.

The Romanian text roughly translates as: “We see some of the garbage that tries to mock our country.

“Let us create a completely different picture. This is the real face and calling us “Romanian Gypsies” emulates **** like TopGear [a popular motoring show in the UK]”

“If you had the nerve to angry an entire country, know that we will not stop defending Romania.”

It is not the first time that the Telegraph, which has since closed down the affected site sections, has been targeted by hackers, with a hack in March 2009 exposing the email addresses of registered users on part of its site. That hack also appeared to originate from Romania, suggesting that the site may be a specific target of an individual or group upset at the paper’s editorial stance.

Rodney Reed Caverly, of Charlotte, North Carolina, is scheduled to plead guilty to a computer fraud charge next Tuesday in federal court in Charlotte, according to his lawyer Christopher Fialko, who has declined to comment further on the case.

Caverly was charged last week with one count of computer fraud for allegedly writing a malicious program that ran on Bank of America’s computers and ATMs. He then proceeded to withdraw cash from an ATM as normal although the programme prevented the withdrawal from being recorded by Bank of America computer systems, meaning that he was free to make withdrawals without any funds being deducted from his account.

It is not clear how much Calverly made from the scam, alleged to have run between March and October 2009, but court records confirm that he withdrew more than $5,000 – the minimum amount before a criminal fraud charge can be brought. The actual figure is expected to be revealed at his trial on April 13.

He faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

Albert Gonzalez from Miami, Florida, was sentenced to a 20 year term after pleading guilty in September 2009 to hacking into retailer payment systems along with two Russian co-conspirators.

The hacking campaign, which targeted some of America’s biggest brands, was described by the judge who sentenced him as “the largest and most costly example of computer hacking in US history”.

In total, more than 250 US companies were targeted, including payment processor Heartland Payment Systems, food and drink store 7-Eleven and American supermarket Hannaford Brothers Co.

Gonzalez was found to have used SQL injection attacks to exploit weaknesses in payment software programmes, allowing him to access data and steal millions of customer card details.

He blamed “curiosity and addiction” for his crimes. As part of a plea bargain, he had handed over to the court expensive jewellery, watches, his car and home as well as a total of  $1m in cash that he had buried in his parents’ garden.

Lord West of Spithead, parliamentary under-secretary for security and counter-terrorism, told the Observer that the UK was under daily cyber attack from overseas, claiming that there had been “300 significant attacks” on the government’s core computer networks in the last year.

West claimed that many of the attacks were coming from state sponsored agencies and, although he refused to reveal who they were, he claimed that the UK would be prepared to go on the offensive in order to stay ahead of the hackers.

“If I went and bombed a power station in France, that would be an act of war,” he said. “If I went on to the net and took out a power station, is that an act of war? One could argue that it was.

“If some state sponsor keeps trying to get into your systems, probably for industrial espionage, are you going to go back into their system and bugger it up? We’re all capable of doing these things. At the moment we wouldn’t do that, but maybe this is where we need to have discussions.

“I’m very worried they [terrorists] may start becoming cuter and try to use our connectivity to have a go at our critical infrastructure, things [that control] our services, our food [distribution] and water supply,” he said. Terrorists were currently “not brilliant” at attempting this sort of attack on infrastructure, he added, but they would learn fast and “we’ve got to be ahead of them”.

His comments come after Google accused two high profile Chinese computing schools as the perpetrators behind an attack on its services earlier this year, whilst British security agency MI5 has warned that tackling espionage conducted by Chinese and Russian agents is taking up an increasing amount of its time.

Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, has also expressed concerns over attacks from overseas on American systems.

Speaking at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, Veracode claimed that as many as as 58% of the 1,600 software applications that it tested could be exposed by a hacking or security attack similar to the Chinese hacking attack that targeted Google services. The company also claimed that the same holes were exploited in attacks on the US Department of Defense.

Veracode analysed a range of application types, and assessed “billions of lines of code” to build a comprehensive security overview, concluding that a wide range of enterprise applications are susceptible to “large scale attacks”.

“Because of the depth and breadth of the data in our platform, we have expansive knowledge about risk from all types of applications and across the software supply chain,” said Matt Moynahan, chief executive at Veracode.

“The report analyses the state of security more comprehensively than any others in this market, and offers specific recommendations for each type of potential threat.”

The company also claimed that the security of open-source applications, where the source code of the software is made open to the public, allowing amateur developers and enthusiasts to create improvements and applications to work with that software is comparable to that found in many outsourced and commercial applications.

Spanish prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero bears some resemblance to the bungling character played by Rowan Atkinson in the 1990s TV comedy and 1996 movie ‘Bean’, something that has formed a joke amongst Spanish citizens for a number of years.

Hackers infiltrated the website earlier today, replacing an image of Mr Zapatero with a smiling photo of Mr Bean and words “Hi there”.

An official confirmed a security breach had affected the page specifically set up to mark Spain’s six-month presidency of the European Union but insisted that no information on the site had been affected.

It isn’t the first time that Mr Zapatero has been compared to Mr Bean after Madrid based newspaper El Pais printed a cartoon depicting Mr Zapatero as Mr Bean above an article critical of the government’s handling of the economy.

A group calling itself the Iranian Cyber Army exploited a flaw in the site’s DNS (Domain Name System) to hack into the service last week, redirecting the URL ‘twitter.com’ to a site containing messages that oppose US interference in the country’s politics. The group also claims to support the party of Mir-Hossein Mousavi, which has challenged presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was elected despite much controversy in June.

Part of the message read: “U.S.A. think they controlling and managing internet by their access, but they don’t, we control and manage internet by our power, so do not try to stimulation Iranian peoples.”

One of the most notable periods of Twitter’s short history occurred during the Iranian elections when, with media communications severely restricted by the Iranian government, protesters, particularly those in the capital Tehran, used Twitter to express their views during the election period. Due to state media restrictions, content from Twitter was one of the primary sources for Western media outlets covering the Iranian election.

At the time of the election, Twitter was scheduled to undergo maintenance that would have made the service inaccessible but intervention from the US government ensured that the site remained live.

Twitter managed to reinstate the service later that day.

“Twitter’s DNS records were temporarily compromised tonight but have now been fixed,” said Twitter co-founder founder Biz Stone in a blog post. “As some noticed, Twitter.com was redirected for a while but API and platform applications were working. We will update with more information and details once we’ve investigated more fully.”

The report, which was commissioned by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, states that the country poses the biggest cyber security risk to the US, claiming “China is likely using its maturing computer network exploitation capability to support intelligence collection against the US government and industry by conducting a long term, sophisticated computer network exploitation campaign.” The claim suggests that China is using hacking techniques to obtain government and industry secrets.

The claim follows a series of computer virus and security attacks on American government departments, many of which are believed to have originated from China.

This report however details how many of these attacks play out, including an attack that exploited an unpatched flaw in Adobe Acrobat that was patched earlier this year.

Citing US Air Force data from 2007, the report says at least 10 to 20 terabytes of sensitive data has been collected from US government networks as part of a “long term, persistent campaign to collect sensitive but unclassified information”.

It’s claimed that some of this information is used to create very targeted and credible phishing messages that then lead to the compromise of even more computers.

The report describes sophisticated, methodical techniques, and speculates on possible connections between Chinese government agencies and the country’s hacker community, increasingly a source of previously unknown “zero-day” computer attacks.

“Little evidence exists in open sources to establish firm ties between the [People's Liberation Army] and China’s hacker community, however, research did uncover limited cases of apparent collaboration between more elite individual hackers and the [People's Republic of China's] civilian security services,” the report stated.

Douglas Havard, who is serving a six year prison sentence at Ranby Prison in Nottinghamshire for his part in a £6.5m ($10.38m) hacking and phishing scam, was asked to take over a project to create an internal TV station using the jail’s computer network.

The 27-year-old was, according to the Sunday Mirror, left unattended by guards despite being afforded access to the prison’s network. He went on to reset a series of passwords that locked out anybody else that attempted to use the system.

Prison bosses were forced to call in computer security consultants in order to fix the problem, with Harvard being put into segregation as punishment for the incident.

The blunder emerged a week after the Sunday Mirror revealed how an inmate at the same jail managed to get a key cut that opened every door.

A Prison Service spokesman told the Sunday Mirror that the breach was being investigated, claiming: “Prisoners are not allowed unsupervised access to computers. The prisoner was not able to access records of any other prisoners.”