Robert McMillan

Kevin Finisterre isn't the type of person you expect to see in a nuclear power plant. With a beach ball-sized Afro, aviator sunglasses and a self-described "swagger," he looks more like Clarence Williams from the '70s TV show "The Mod Squad" than an electrical engineer.

But people like Finisterre, who don't fit the traditional mold of buttoned-down engineer, are playing an increasingly important role in the effort to lock down the machines that run the world's major industrial systems. Finisterre is a white-hat hacker. He prods and probes computer systems, not to break into them, but to uncover important vulnerabilities. He then sells his expertise to companies that want to improve their security.

A 35-year-old man was arrested Wednesday on charges that he broke into the email accounts of numerous Hollywood celebrities and stole private photographs and correspondence.

Christopher Chaney, of Jacksonville, Florida, is accused of breaking into more than 50 online accounts over the past year, including those of Scarlett Johansson, Christina Aguilera and Mila Kunis, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation said.

Prosecutors call it the biggest identity theft bust in U.S. history. On Friday, 111 bank tellers, retail workers, waiters and alleged criminals were charged with running a credit-card-stealing organization that stole more than US$13 million in less than a year-and-a-half.

"This is by far the largest -- and certainly among the most sophisticated -- identity theft/credit card fraud cases that law enforcement has come across," the Queens County District Attorney's office said in a statement announcing the arrests.

As news of the death of Steve Jobs spread around the Internet, the tributes came pouring in Wednesday, crediting Apple's co-founder and chairman with--more than once--changing computing as we know it.

Apple's Web page was black and white on Wednesday afternoon, displaying only a photograph of Jobs in his trademark black turtleneck. "Apple has lost a visionary and a creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend," the company said on its website. Apple invites fans to send in condolences to rememberingsteve@apple.com.

It's the last thing McAfee would want users to hear about one of its products, but the Firefox browser is advising users to disable McAfee's ScriptScan software, saying that it could cause "stability or security problems."

SriptScan ships with McAfee's VirusScan antivirus program. It's designed to keep Web surfer's safe by scanning for any malicious scripting code that might be running in the browser. But according to Mozilla it has an unintended side-effect: It can cause Firefox to crash... a lot.

Something has gone terribly wrong on the plant floor at ACME Specialty Chemical International Inc.

Liquid is overflowing from vats, the power keeps shutting off, and CEO Jeff Hahn has no idea what's going on. Behind him is a computer used to control the factory. Ominously, the cursor moves around on the screen as if it has developed a life of its own. "I have no control of my mouse," says the woman at the terminal.

Microsoft opened a front in its ongoing battle against Internet scammers, using the power of a U.S. court to deal a knockout blow to an emerging botnet and taking offline a provider of free Internet domains.

Microsoft used the same technique that worked in its earlier takedowns of the Rustock and Waledac botnets, asking a U.S. court to order Verisign to shut down 21 Internet domains associated with the command-and-control servers that form the brains of the Kelihos botnet.

The website for the open-source MySQL database was hacked and used to serve malware to visitors Monday.

Security vendor Armorize noticed the problem at around 5 a.m. Pacific Time Monday. Hackers had installed JavaScript code that threw a variety of known browser attacks at visitors to the site, so those with out-of-date browsers or unpatched versions of Adobe Flash, Reader or Java on their Windows PCs could have been quietly infected with malicious software.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has arrested a Phoenix student, claiming that he is one of the LulzSec hackers responsible for a database attack on Sony Pictures computers that claimed more than 1 million victims.

Cody Kretsinger, 23, was arrested Thursday morning on hacking and conspiracy charges. Prosecutors say he was "Recursion," an LulzSec hacker who used a database attack technique called SQL injection to break into Sony Pictures systems. Kretsinger allegedly provided data that was used in a mammoth June 2, 2011, data dump by LulzSec that included coupon codes along with email addresses and passwords belonging to Sony customers.

A California man who dug up sensitive information belonging to U.S. service members on peer-to-peer networks, and then used it to order iPods, cameras, and even washing machines from an online store, was sentenced to 75 months in federal prison Thursday.

Rene Quimby, 42, had already pleaded guilty to fraud and identity theft charges in May. According to court filings, Quimby stumbled upon the scam four years ago after uncovering military rosters listing sensitive information online. His victim was the Army and Air Force Exchange Services (AAFES), the organization that does about US$10 billion in business annually, running the post exchange retail outlets on military bases.

A federal judge threw out a small part of Oracle's Java lawsuit against Google on Thursday but allowed the bulk of the case to proceed.

Oracle sued Google last year, arguing that Google had violated its Java intellectual property by writing its own version of the Java virtual machine, called Dalvik. Google had asked that the case be thrown out of court, based on a number of arguments. In Thursday's ruling, the judge rejected the bulk of Google's arguments but did agree to throw out one of Oracle's claims in the case.

SAP has agreed to pay just over US$20 million to settle a criminal case brought against its TomorrowNow subsidiary.

SAP Chief Financial Officer of Global Customer Operations Mark White pleaded guilty Wednesday on behalf of his company to charges that employees of TomorrowNow accessed Oracle's customer support portal without authorization and illegally downloaded software and support documents. In a plea agreement struck between SAP's TomorrowNow subsidiary and the U.S. Department of Justice, the company agreed to pay $20,004,800 in fines and submit to three years of corporate probation.