It isn't clear why, but a number of U.S. Department of Justice websites appear to be offline as of this post. Affected sites include Justice.gov, DEA.gov, ICE.gov, and USMarshals.gov.

The U.S. National Center for Disaster Fraud (NCDF), which was originally established in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is working with the FBI to help weed out disaster relief scams taking advantage of the devastating Haitian and Chilean earthquakes.

More than 20 federal agencies, including the FBI, participate in the NCDF, allowing the center to act as a centralized clearinghouse of information related to Haitian or Chilean relief fraud.

For information on how to report cases of suspected disaster relief fraud visit the FBI website here.

The BBC has an interesting article (link below) about Russian hackers. Sarah Rainsford who wrote the piece interviews cybersecurity expert Yevgeny Kaspersky, "Andrei" - a "reformed" 20-year-old hacker who now works for an information security company, and some of the "cyber-warriors of Tomsk university".

The UK's Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure delivered its annual cybersecurity report to the Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee this week. The Telegraph reports (link below) that in this meeting one of the key pieces of testimony was that "foreign intelligence services have successfully compromised the security of many large British companies".

According to a report (link below) from Today's Zaman, in a nationwide operation on Thursday Turkish police arrested 23 suspected "hackers" who are accused of working on behalf of the separatist group, the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which is considered a terrorist organization by Turkey, the EU and the U.S.

In a new CSO article, senior editor Bill Brenner, presents a list of four overrated security technologies and asks the questions, "[A]re practitioners clinging to tools that outlived their usefulness long ago? Were those tools ever really useful to begin with?

By now it is widely known that the French government received information on 1,500 alleged French tax evaders that was stolen from the Swiss branch of HSBC. It's also clear that Germany is considering paying the same HSBC data thief for account information on about 3,000 suspected German tax evaders.

What HSBC announced today for the first time is that the former IT worker stole information on 24,000 current and former HSBC account holders. Approximately 15,000 of these are still customers of the bank.