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A group who refers to itself as Anonymous has as taken credit for a recent string of high-profile cyber attacks against the websites of businesses, banks and politicians that have either spoken out against or stopped doing business with WikiLeaks. Cyber attacks, dubbed Operation Payback, targets those who have caved into US government pressure to shun the whistleblower website that recently released thousands of classified US diplomatic cables. The activist hackers have attacked MasterCard.com, PostFinance, Visa, Paypal.com, and others.

It seems ironic to have a credit card made of solid gold, but Visa and Sberbank have begun offering a credit card made of solid gold to Sberbank’s top 100 customers in Kazakhstan as a companion card to the Visa Infinite card, hoping to capitalize on what they see as a “growing appetite for elite, status-symbol cards.”

A DNS provider that suffered backlash last week after it was wrongly identified as supplying and then dropping DNS service to WikiLeaks has decided to support the secret-spilling site, offering DNS service to two domains distributing WikiLeaks content.

In the language of credit cards, “gold” has long been used to describe a certain level of benefits and consumer protections. Many banks issue Gold Visa or MasterCard credit cards, and American Express features a Gold card in its charge-card lineup.
Soon, “gold” will be used to describe a new type of credit card – but in more literal terms. The Gold Bullion credit card promises to be backed up by the value of your own gold bullion coins. Don’t have any? The company marketing the card can buy them for you at market rates.

The attack also highlights the inability of the private sector -- including industries that would be expected to employ the most sophisticated cyber defenses -- to protect itself.

As interest has surged in Bitcoin, platforms that support the digital currency have been hit by damaging cyberattacks this week. Mt. Gox, a Tokyo-based exchange that claims to handle more than 70% of all Bitcoin trades, said in a statement on Thursday that it had been hit by a massive Distributed Denial of Service attack. In a DDoS attack, hackers direct a giant traffic surge to their target, overwhelming the site's servers and making it hard for legitimate users to gain access.

Instead of prosecuting elite computer hackers, the US government should recruit them to launch cyber-attacks against Islamist terrorists and other foes, according to a leading military thinker and government adviser. The brilliance of hacking experts could be put to use on behalf of the US in the same way as German rocket scientists were enlisted after the second world war, said John Arquilla, a professor of defence analysis at the US Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, in an interview with the Guardian.

Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. agreed to pay scores of retailers more than $6 billion to settle a long-running lawsuit in an agreement that also permits merchants to charge higher prices to customers who pay for purchases with credit cards.

The settlement is expected to have wide-ranging implications for consumers, retailers and the card industry. It is also the latest victory for merchants, who have recently logged some significant wins in their efforts to reduce their cost of accepting plastic.

In recent days, with Iranians taking to the streets to protest against the government, the country's Islamic authorities have boosted their censorship efforts in a bid to crush opposition activity online. This is where Anonymous and its "Operation: Iran" come in.