Blizzard Entertainment is warning World of Warcraft players that they should be on the lookout for what it calls a "dangerous Trojan" that is capable of stealing their account information - even if they are using Blizzard's WoW account authenticator for extra protection.

The hacking group known as "DERP" has reportedly struck again, claiming responsibility for taking down EA's digital distribution platform Origin yesterday.

The hacker organization claimed responsibility for the attack in posts via Twitter.

"We've directed the Gaben Laser Beam @ the EA login servers. Origin #offline."

Apple has responded strongly to reports that the National Security Agency claims a "100-percent success rate" in attaching spyware to iOS apps. The revelation about the NSA's targeting of Apple products comes from a recent Der Speigel report featuring leaked documents from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided to various journalists. The NSA program targeting Apple products is called DROPOUTJEEP, and allows the agency to intercept SMS messages, access contact lists, locate a phone using cell tower data, and even activate the device’s microphone and camera.

The hacker group "DERP" has claimed responsibility for a series of DDoS attacks yesterday against multiple games and game services including League of Legends, EA.com, Battle.net, and other gaming sites. While all of the aforementioned sites were only downed for a short period of time (on average about 10-15 minutes), the real target of the attacks was a popular Twitch streamer known as Phantom L0rd.

According to a Reddit thread, the hacking group decided to harass the Twitch personality for the "lulz." Here's more from Reddit:

Rockstar is calming Grand Theft Auto players down who are concerned that they may get their accounts banned through no fault of their own. The fear stems from GTA Online money hackers who are giving away large sums of (we assume ill-gotten) in-game currency to strangers, making them vulnerable to a ban by Rockstar.

Rockstar's position is that honest players do not need to be worried about getting banned.

Here's more from Rockstar's support page for the game:

According to Kotaku, late last week ten men in China were sentenced to two years in prison (each) and fined for their part in hacking World of Warcraft accounts. The sentencing took place in Zhejiang province's Songyang county court (China).

If you shopped at U.S. retailer Target on Black Friday, you may want to pay close attention to the following story from the BBC.

A Consumer Affairs report says that hacking attempts against the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are ramping up. According to the report, which is based on information from security firm Kaspersky Lab, hackers have launched an average of 34,000 attacks per day across the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and other game platforms. Kaspersky also says that it has found 4.6 million pieces of gaming-focused malware against the various game systems to-date.

Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor) hacker Jeremy Hammond will be sentenced on Nov. 15. The admitted Anonymous member pled guilty earlier this year to infiltrating the computers of the private intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor) and releasing the information on the Internet.

Call of Duty: Ghost, the latest in Activision's best-selling military-themed shooter series, releases today, but current generation versions of the game have been hacked, according to this Polygon report.

A 12-year-old Canadian boy reportedly was the mastermind behind a hack that brought down government web sites during the 2012 Quebec student protests, according to an RT.com report.

The unnamed fifth grader managed to take down multiple Canadian government web sites including the Quebec Institute of Public Health, and even Chilean government site. His targets were down for several days, according to reports, even as police clashed with college students in the streets over tuition hikes in a 2012 protest.

Riot Games president Marc Merrill's Twitter account was hacked and the hacker has leaked images of a League of Legends spin-off title that was being fooled around with, but ultimately shelved. Merrill confirmed this via his Twitter account which he has managed to regain control of:

"Yup, someone got onto my Twitter account," Merrill Tweeted on October 13. "Yup, someone shared some old screens from one of the many prototypes we've experimented with."

Adobe says that it has suffered a large scale security breach that may have affected the personal information of an estimated 2.9 million customers. The security breach could have an impact on anyone that develops Flash games or uses any of Adobe's popular software products on a daily basis.

A few days ago the FBI issued an alert for a particularly nasty Trojan called "Beta Bot." If you have had the displeasure of having to deal with the fake FBI branded malware "FBI Moneypak," then you know what hardcore industrial grade malware is but, Beta Bot is apparently much worse.

Apple announced that its two new iPhones - the iPhone 5C and 5S - have collectively sold more than nine million units in their first three days of availability. We're certainly not shocked by those numbers, nor is Apple CEO Tim Cook:

"This is our best iPhone launch yet," beamed Apple's Tim Cook. "More than nine million new iPhones sold is a new record for first weekend sales."

Apple also said that the new operating system for its phone and tablet devices - iOS 7 - is now being used on more than 200 million iOS devices.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection services company Prolexic issued a press release today detailing what it calls "the rampant problem of denial of service attacks within and from online gaming communities." These DDoS attacks are often fueled by rivalries, poor password security protocols and readily available DDoS tools, according to Stuart Scholly, president of Prolexic. The company released its findings in a new White Paper released today.

Riot Games revealed that account information for a "portion of" North American League of Legends players was recently compromised. According to Riot, usernames, email addresses, encrypted passwords, and some names were compromised, along with approximately "120,000 transaction records from 2011 that contained hashed and salted credit card numbers have been accessed."

A scary message greeted anyone who visited various Crytek-related web sites on late Friday:

Update: Rich Ferraro, Vice President of Communications for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), was kind enough to offer his opinion on the WBC's planned protest of GaymerX. He also confirmed that members of his organization plan on attending the event.

Apple has done a pretty good job of keeping emulator software apps off of its iOS devices, mainly because it believes that such software encourages piracy, but a new app that allows users to emulate Nintendo games has managed to find a loophole. The program is called GBA4iOS, and as its name implies, it allows you to emulate Game Boy Advance games on iOS devices such as iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch. The software was created by Riley Testut, who also created a Super NES emulator for iOS devices.

The developers of the indie action RPG game Cube World have been trying to sell early alpha access to the game for a little under a weak but fans who try to purchase the game keep getting an error and can't complete the purchase. At first developers thought the problem was that too many visitors were trying to buy the cute little voxel-based RPG at the same time.

It turns out that the problem is that someone has been consistently bombarding the servers with an intentional distributed denial of service attack.

Nintendo announced that Club Nintendo, its member rewards site in Japan, has been hacked. The security breach was discovered when Nintendo noticed a large number of access errors on July 2. This prompted Nintendo to conduct a deeper investigation. Looking further into the issue, Nintendo found 23,000 instances of unauthorized log-ins (with 15 million attempts) between June 9 and July 4 on Japan's Club Nintendo site. The security breach does not apply to Club Nintendo sites in other countries, according to Nintendo.

Ubisoft has sent out emails and set up a support thread related to a recent security breach related to Ubisoft accounts. The company says that an exploit was used to gain unauthorized access to some of its online systems resulting user names, email addresses and encrypted passwords being exposed. The company claims that it was quick to take action and that credit and debit card information was not compromised because it is not stored on the same servers as personal information.

Blizzard seems to be having a hell of a time with its online auction houses lately.

Last month, a Diablo III patch introduced a gold-duplicating bug that forced the developer to take the game's auction house offline until it could fix the bug and audit players' accounts.

Ubisoft's Watch Dogs couldn't be more topical and timely than at this very moment. With the revelation that the NSA is allegedly collecting data from our Internet activity on sites like Google and Facebook and tracking the data of Americans' mobile phones, Watch Dogs is like this generation's cautionary tale on government tyranny (think 1984 or Fahrenheit 451).

If rights holders had their way they would have the ability to install rootkits and deploy malware that would include Ransomeware (restricted access to your computer until you pay them a fee) on to the computer systems of hackers and illegal file downloaders in order to fight piracy and cyber attacks. This may sound a little too over-the-top, but these are just some of the crazy ideas presented in a new report by the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property.

Motherboard (part of VICE - which you may know better from their new weekly news show on HBO) has an interesting interview with two hackers - Dragon and PhäntömZ - who run a stresser/booter company called Agony (a stresser/booter is a software or service that allows a user to flood a network). In the Interview the publication talks to the duo about Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, botnets, shells, black hat and white hat hackers, Anonymous, CISPA, and more.

The BBC reports that four members of the hacktivist group LulzSec based in the United Kingdom have been sentenced this week. They are Ryan Cleary, Jake Davis, Mustafa al-Bassam and Ryan Ackroyd. All four pled guilty to various charges either last year or earlier this year.

The Columbus Dispatch reports that 23-year-old Todd M. Miller has been sentenced to one year of house arrest for his part in the 2008 security breach of Sony's PlayStation Network. Miller wasn't convicted on charges directly related to the hacking, but for destroying computers the FBI was interested in investigating related to the crime. Miller was sentenced last week.

At a recent Ubisoft press event to promote its upcoming game Watch Dogs, senior producer Dominic Guay revealed how the company is working hard to make the hacking in the game as authentic as humanly possible. Joystiq covered the press event extensively in this article.