This week, we cover news of hackers getting their hands on government and corporate data, phishing attacks on microblogging site Tumblr, and a Facebook hire who boasts a high profile online for hacking.

First, let's look at those busy hackers. Their targets included the governments of Zimbabwe and Brazil, a municipal government in Australia, and entertainment companies Universal Music Group and Viacom. They released nearly 380 MB of data publicly that they claim is from these hacks.  The data can be found on the Pirate Bay file-sharing site.

Meanwhile, the notorious hacker group Anonymous reportedly hit a tourism website for Orlando, Florida with a distributed denial-of-service attack, temporarily shutting it down. Anonymous said that they attacked to protest the arrest of Food not Bombs volunteers. The volunteers were taken into custody for serving food in public in Orlando without a permit.

Next, let's take a look at the dangers users of Tumblr have faced over the past few days. GFI Labs reported that hackers have targeted users of the microblogging site with phishing scams. The scam tries to get users to “log in,” thus stealing their credentials, in order to see adult content.

In a post, GFI Labs explained that the hackers take the compromised accounts and convert their pages into fake login pages; some of the account redirect people to a different website. Even one of the anti-phishing sites that Tumblr users set up to warn others was compromised; GFI Labs found that it was directing to one of the servers being used by the attackers.

Finally, Facebook hired a name that should be well-known to those with iPhones, and those who keep tabs on the hacker community. George Hotz, better known as “Geohot,” was hired by the social networking company in May. Back in 2007, Hotz unlocked the iPhone, and has continued to unlock it since.

As you might expect, some of his exploits have led to lawsuits. Sony sued Hotz for allegedly hacking the PlayStation 3 so that users could run custom software packages on it. In its filing, Sony accused Hotz of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Computer Fraud Abuse Act. The two parties settled out of court and did not reveal the terms of the deal.

The question most people are asking right now, though, concerns what Hotz is actually doing or working on for Facebook. The social network isn't saying, and even Hotz himself is mum so far.

For more on these items, visit: http://news.cnet.com/security/?tag=hdr;snav.    

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