Japan's most-wanted hacker is also one its most brazen. After taunting authorities for months, the hacker sent them a mocking clue in the form of a memory card strapped to a cat which lived on an island near Tokyo. Above is video of the authorities capturing the cat on January 5th, which was tracked down only after they solved a bunch of riddles the hacker emailed to dozens of Japanese newspapers on New Years Day.

A Twitter shit-storm is brewing. A hugely popular Anonymous twitter account, @youranonnews, which boasts 750,000 followers was suspended minutes ago, and if there's anything the hacktivist collective hates it's online censorship.

Christopher Chaney, a 35-year-old Florida resident who hacked into email accounts belonging to Scarlett Johansson, Mila Kunis, Christina Aguilera and others, was sentenced to 10 years in prison today. Earlier this year, Chaney pled guilty to nine felonies, including charges of theft and wiretapping.

Is it a crime for someone simply to share a link to stolen information? That seems to be the message conveyed by today's indictment of former Anonymous spokesman Barrett Brown, over a massive hack of the private security firm Stratfor. Brown's in legal trouble for copying and pasting a link from one chat room to another. This is scary to anyone who ever links to anything.

On a gray Wednesday morning in October, the car headed west on the Lincoln Highway Bridge hit 100 miles per hour and I started to worry it might hurtle off into the tangle of rusted-out warehouses and smoke stacks that pass for a landscape in northeastern New Jersey. I peeked over the driver's shoulder, watching the speedometer approach the sound barrier. But my companion in the back seat of the Buick, the 27-year-old hacker and internet troll Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer, seemed not to notice as we nearly doubled the speed limit. He slouched and explained to the driver, who had asked him for a cigarette, why he didn't have any.

For 24 hours, the internet was subjected to, or blessed with, if that's what you're into, the image of me in a tutu with a shoe on my head. (We're still waiting for the Smithsonian to request the tutu for inclusion in its special collections.) Now it's time for Anonymous to hold up their side of the deal.

An anonymous group of hackers — not to be confused with the hacking group Anonymous — claims it's sitting on a treasure trove of Mitt Romney's unreleased tax returns freshly lifted from the PricewaterhouseCoopers offices in Franklin, Tennessee, and say they will make them available to the public at the end of this month unless they receive a million dollars in unmarked Bitcoins.

As a journalist, I am sworn to bring facts to light by any means necessary. So here is a picture of me in a tutu with a shoe on my head at Gawker HQ. (A size 9 1/2 men's Reebok Question, to be exact.)

While not as damning as Anthony Weiner's penis, a photo of Bow Wow spooning another man appeared on Twitter last night, inspiring the traditional cries of "I was hacked," followed by purging of Bow Wow's entire account.

Imagine if you turned on your computer and found your entire digital life was wiped: years of photos, emails, documents—gone. That happened to Wired writer Mat Honan last weekend, when hackers broke into his most important accounts. But it could have probably been prevented if he'd done one thing: Enabled "two-factor authentication" on his Gmail account.

Yesterday I wrote a a post about the decline of the message board 4chan as a cultural force on the web. This sparked an unusually well-reasoned email from a 4chan browser explaining why 4chan's newfound obscurity is 'great news' for its users. Here it is, with a few annotations.

It's unclear what could have possessed KTLA Morning News entertainment reporter Sam Rubin to tweet "fake ass nigga" at rapper-producer Yung Berg. The offending tweet has been removed — although it stayed up for several hours before that — and Rubin is claiming he was hacked, but this story still doesn't make a lot of sense.

Useless virtual high school career fair LinkedIn was reportedly hacked, and 6.5 million passwords leaked to a Russian hacking website. The passwords were encrypted, but hackers have apparently already cracked more than 300,000. ZDNet reports that the hack affects less than 10 percent of LinkedIn's user base, but you should probably change your LinkedIn password, after spending 20 minutes trying to remember your LinkedIn password, just in case.

For 50 days during the summer of 2011, the members of Lulz Security were the most famous hackers on the planet. A splinter group of the hacktivist collective Anonymous, LulzSec tore up Fox News Fox Broadcasting, crashed the CIA's website and leaked hundreds of thousands of Sony customers' passwords, boasting of each new hack on their entertaining Twitter account.

A general principle to keep in mind when dealing with hackers is: If a gang of hackers announces the exact date, time and targets of an upcoming hack, it is not going to happen. So we'd bet 800 bitcoins that this attack on "46 major companies around the world" planned for 4pm today by a hacking group associated with Anonymous is not going to come off.

In a press release, Anonymous hacker claim to have leaked 1.7 GB of data stolen from the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics, a Department of Justice agency that collects and analyzes crime data.

The hacktivist collective Anonymous has been unusually quiet after a slew of arrests and the revelation that one of its key members was an FBI snitch. Now a fugitive member has put Anonymous back in headlines with some spectacular, and likely bullshit, claims.

Celebrities' email accounts are hacked so frequently it seems like they might as well upload their nude pics directly to the internet. Why? It's been ridiculously simple to break into their accounts with just a few pieces of information.

Following this afternoon's report on Arianna Huffington's AOL email account getting hacked, the new media mogul has confirmed the hack and revealed the culprits: Nigerian scam artists. Happens to the best of us.

Early yesterday morning, Arianna Huffington's AOL email address sent a spam hyperlink to numerous people in her address book. It was an email virus, the apparent product of a hack on the AOL News headmistress' personal account.