CyberForce used Twitter to claim responsibility, saying “We have succeeded in the attack against the government.”

It also indicated it would launch more attacks this morning, saying “this op starts at 24.00,” but it was not immediately clear who the targets for those attacks may be.

The group said it had used a denial of service attack against the government, which essentially swamps a website with false users.

Government spokesman Jacob Lagercranser confirmed the website — used by all departments of Sweden’s government — had experienced some problems, but he declined to give further details, saying the government never comments on security issues.

“Periodically, we’ve experienced some problems in getting in on it. We’re working on the problems,” he said. The site was up and running again later Saturday.

CyberForce describes itself as part of the hacking collective Anonymous, which drew international attention by hacking onto a private conference call by the FBI and Britain’s Scotland Yard, then publishing the roughly 15-minute-long recording of the call on the Internet on Friday.

In the past week, Saboteurs have stolen passwords and sensitive information on tipsters while hacking into the websites of several law enforcement agencies worldwide.

For most people, that word means something malicious _ shady criminals who listen in on private voicemails, or anonymous villains who cripple websites and break into email accounts.

For Facebook, though, hacker means something different. It’s an ideal that permeates the company’s culture. It explains the push to try new ideas (even if they fail), and to promote new products quickly (even if they’re imperfect). The hacker approach has made Facebook one of the world’s most valuable Internet companies.

Hackers “believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete,” Zuckerberg explains. “They just have to go fix it _ often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.”

Zuckerberg penned those words in a 479-word essay called “The Hacker Way”, which he included in the document the company filed with government regulators about its plans for an initial public offering. The company is seeking $5 billion from investors in a deal that could value Facebook at as much as $100 billion.

The 27-year-old, who has a $28.4 billion stake in the stock deal, uses the H-word 12 times in the essay; “shareholder” appears just once. Should Zuckerberg have left those references out of his IPO manifesto, knowing full-well it could scare off potential investors? He could easily have described Facebook as “nimble” or “agile” instead.

“Symbolically, it doesn’t bode well to Facebook and to potential investors,” says Robert D’Ovidio, an associate professor of criminal justice at Drexel University in Philadelphia who studies computer crime. “I think it shows maybe an immaturity on his part. He should definitely know better.”

By using the word, Zuckerberg is also trying to reclaim it. To him, Steve Jobs and the founders of many of the world’s biggest technology companies were hackers.

“The word `hacker’ has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers,” Zuckerberg writes. “In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done.”

To be fair, the meaning has become complicated. Bad hackers destroy things with evil intentions. They break into the voicemails of crime victims and celebrities in search of a hot news story. They breach security systems to steal credit card data. Just this week, members of the loose-knit group Anonymous hacked into law enforcement websites around the world and gained access to information about government informants and other sensitive information.

Good hackers break things, too, sometimes. But they do it in the name of innovation. They call themselves “white hat” hackers to counter the criminal “black hats.” Often, they’re hired to expose security vulnerabilities at big corporations. Kevin Mitnick, who was convicted and sent to prison in the 1990s for computer hacking, now works as a security consultant. It’s the flip side of his past life, when he spent years stealing secrets from some of the world’s largest corporations.

“I break into computers to find holes before the bad guys do,” he says.

To Mitnick, Zuckerberg’s “Hacker Way” is about finding clever ways to fix problems. It can also mean identifying a new use for something old.

Nathan Hamblen, who works for the website Meetup.com, says the best hacks are those that do something unexpected, something surprising that no one else has thought of.

The term “hacking” dates back more than half a century, when geeks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were tweaking telephone systems and computers.

“MIT was the Mesopotamia of hacking. That’s where hacking culture began,” says Steven Levy, the Wired Magazine writer who authored the 1984 book “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.”

The small community of hackers in the 1950s and `60s judged one another on their creative and technical abilities, and wore the term as a badge of honor, says Levy, in much the same way that Zuckerberg does today.

“They were the ones who did what you weren’t supposed to do on a computer,” Levy explains.

Some were pranksters, too. In the 1970s, before they founded Apple, Steve Jobs and his buddy Steve Wozniak figured out how to break into telephone systems and make free phone calls. In one infamous prank, the two Steves dialed up the Vatican to find out who would pick up.

“Wozniak pretended to be Henry Kissinger wanting to speak to the pope. `Ve are at de summit meeting in Moscow, and we need to talk to the pope,’ Woz intoned. He was told that it was 5:30 a.m. and the pope was sleeping,” writes Walter Isaacson in his recent biography of Jobs.

It wasn’t until the 1980s and `90s that hacking took a bad turn. Some blame Robert Morris, a computer science student who discovered a vulnerability in the Internet’s inner workings and unleashed the world’s first computer worm in 1988.

“He essentially brought the Internet to a grinding halt,” says D’Ovidio, the criminal justice professor. Morris was the first person charged under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that had been enacted two years earlier.

Movies like 1983′s “War Games” also fueled the public’s fear of hacking. In the film, a hacker unwittingly comes close to starting the next World War, thinking it’s all a computer game.

“It happened because of Hollywood and because there was no other word out there,” says Andrew Howard, 28, a research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. “Hacker is a cool word, right? It’s a neat-sounding word.”

The `80s and `90s were also a time when computers spread from geek circles to office cubicles and home desktops. They were becoming mainstream. But they were still mysterious to most people. They wondered: “How do they work? Is someone going to break into them?”

Zuckerberg’s hacker manifesto is a nod to Levy, who codified “The Hacker Ethic” in his book about the subculture. Among the principles: “Hackers should be judged by their hacking” and “Always yield to the hands-on imperative.”

The hands-on imperative is important to Facebook. Zuckerberg still spends hours writing computer code, even though he has hired hundreds of engineers.

That ethos helped Zuckerberg’s social network to prosper. As the once mighty MySpace stopped innovating, its users flocked to the cleaner, crisper, always-changing Facebook. News Corp. gave up on MySpace and sold it for $35 million last June. Meanwhile, Facebook’s user base ballooned to 845 million, even as the website has gone through changes and redesigns that have angered members and privacy advocates.

Zuckerberg and others may yet be able to clean up the term. Meetup’s Hamblen thinks it’s already happening.

“People aren’t as afraid of technology, which was driving the fear of hackers,” he says. “It was someone doing something with software that you don’t understand. As people become more comfortable with technology in general, then hacking becomes a way of seeing it as using it in a clever way.”

(click image for larger view and for slideshow)Today, strict security requirements mean most employees at the National Security Agency have to leave their mobile devices in their cars in the parking lot rather than bringing them in to work. Someday soon, however, that will change, as the agency is working on a plan to introduce secure, commercially available mobile devices and approve an architecture that will enable other agencies to use mobile devices with classified data.

NAS, which manages security requirements government-wide for so-called National Security Systems that access classified and sensitive data, has put together an initial series of security requirements for mobile devices and is currently running pilots with customized commercially available devices to collect data on performance and usability, particularly around concerns like latency that are accentuated by NSA’s encryption demands. Within the next few months, NSA will begin its outreach with the tech industry to discuss how technology companies can help the military and intelligence communities meet their needs.

Consumer demand for mobile devices–a demand that government agencies and private sector companies alike are facing–is in many ways the key catalyst for this push toward mobility. “People desire to use their consumer devices to access their corporate networks,” Troy Lange, NSA’s mobility mission manager, said in an interview. “This is about bringing efficiencies and capabilities that people are used to in their everyday lives and extending that to our national security mission.”

[ Overcoming security breaches will face many challenges. Read Anonymous Hacked FBI Conference Call. ]

Eventually, at the NSA, at least, this would entail enabling mobile access to classified systems and other national security systems, developing mobile enterprise apps and an app store for NSA employees to use, and providing one device for both classified and unclassified networks that can, for example, tell when users enter a secure or classified environment and adjusts security controls appropriately.

However, information security barriers remain, both for access to national security systems in general and for NSA. Due to the highly classified nature of much of its work, NSA has some of the strictest requirements in government, including whole buildings that are labeled as Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facilities, which have additional requirements. Those strict security rules have thus far meant that the small number of mobile devices currently floating around at NSA and in other classified environments have been built mostly from the ground up exclusively for government.

Among those devices are the General Dynamics Sectera Edge and L3 Guardian devices, which are classified as Secure Mobile Environment-Portable Electronic Devices, or SME-PEDs. Both are 3G Windows Mobile-based devices that let users receive classified phone calls and email and Web-browse on classified secret. L3 Guardian devices cost $3,150, while GSM-compatible Sectera Edge devices list at $3,145 for a device with a one year warranty. A Sectera Edge accessory kit that includes a carrying case, charger, headphones, microSD cards, and spare battery costs $845 extra. Support can up the cost even more.

That’s not a cost-effective proposition, and the one-off development isn’t a strategy that can keep pace with the rapid development cycles in today’s mobile world. NSA’s aim is to move to commercially available technology and to help enable industry to meet its needs. Lange said that some of the devices now in circulation at NSA might remind people of “old cellphones.”

“Unfortunately, consumer devices are not built with security as their primary market differentiator,” Lange said. “So the question is how to secure them so that they can access our IT infrastructure.”

One piece of the puzzle might be SE Android, a secure version of the Android operating system developed by NSA’s trusted systems research organization and released as open source in January. SE Android, the fruit of one of several mobile security research efforts at NSA (other work includes research on virtualization and micro-kernels), provides stronger ways to isolate apps from one another and the system itself, to force devices to share data and files in a more secure manner, and to separate data and application processing.

The current commercial version of Android relies on discretionary access controls, which give the owner of the data, whether human or machine, complete discretion over how data is accessed on the device and whether controls can be overridden. Android SE relies on mandatory access controls, which centralize and lock down those policies.

According to NSA, these security upgrades help prevent malicious apps from commandeering or wiping a device, or from running hidden processes in the background that surreptitiously access data on the device.

NSA’s goal with SE Android is ultimately the same as the rest of its mobile strategy: to enable the NSA to rely on commercial technologies. According to Stephen Smalley, an NSA researcher who helped develop both SE Android and the earlier SE Linux (which has since been integrated into the open-source Linux operating system itself), NSA hopes SE Android will ultimately be adopted by device manufacturers, be leveraged by other mobile operating system developers as a model for secure mobility, and become integrated into the Android open-source project.

Another project that NSA could draw on is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Transformative Apps project. Under the umbrella of that project, DARPA is working with organizations like the National Institute of Standards and Technologies and George Mason University to create a secure Android platform.

George Mason and NIST are helping to harden the Android kernel by, for example, stripping it of features and functionality that military and intelligence agencies won’t need. Researchers also have worked on encryption, and have run 200,000 mobile apps through application testing software that identifies app functionality and then enables users or administrators to turn different pieces of that functionality off as needed. For example, a flashlight app might have no need to access the network.

Pilot tests are well underway on commercially available devices, and pieces of the project will, like SE Android, soon be open sourced. “The project is more mature than people know,” says Angelos Stavrou, a George Mason University professor working on the DARPA project. “It’s not something that’s designed in a lab to stay in the lab. It works on devices now, and people are actually using it.”

In fact, devices built as part of that program are already out on the battlefield. The 3rd Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division has deployed about several hundred devices in Afghanistan, and other Army units are reportedly requesting devices as well.

“All this work will allow us to get out of the business of having to build our own devices,” said Lange. “We’re not looking at a government-specific build of the Android operating system, but we want to take advantage of something like this as a component of an overall, industry-provided solution. We want to be able to provide mobile devices, but we want to avoid modifications as much as we can.”

Overall, the NSA’s mobile security strategy is one of “defense in depth,” Lange said. “We understand that any single piece may have vulnerabilities, but you build in redundancy to increase security.”

For example, data in transit will require multiple layers of encryption, including an encrypted VPN channel and another independent layer of encryption for voice and data traffic such as VoIP. The encryption will need to meet NSA’s Suite B encryption standards, which have been available for several years.

Cloud computing and thin-client technology will also play a role in ensuring mobile security for the agency. “A thin client cloud architecture where you offload as much data as you can from the endpoint ensures that when your device is lost, you don’t lose your data,” Lange explained.

As part of the strategy, the government may also continue to maintain control over certain elements that are often handed off to mobile service providers. For example, the NSA would likely have control of over-the-air updates, the subscriber database for all NSA users, and issuing of SIM cards.

The package of requirements NSA will begin putting together in a few months is something that other agencies that use classified and other national security IT systems could use as well. Lange says he’s been working closely with the rest of the intelligence community and the Department of Defense, which are also increasingly looking toward mobile devices. The Army and the Defense Information Systems Agency, for example, have been taking numerous steps toward the embrace of mobile devices, including pilot projects in the Army and the creation of a mobile device management program office at DISA.

Ultimately, NSA’s strategy isn’t going to result in putting smartphones into the hands of all the employees within America’s national security apparatus tomorrow, or even anytime soon. Lange concedes that it’s still a multi-year, long-term strategy. However, the fact that NSA and others are getting a move on is what matters. As smart mobility becomes more and more ubiquitous in both the consumer and business worlds, the industry will not wait, and neither should America’s military and intelligence community.

Find out how to create and implement a security program that will defend against malicious and inadvertent internal incidents and satisfy government and industry mandates in our Compliance From The Inside Out report. (Free registration required.)

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According to Motorola, some of the compromised data potentially includes user names and passwords for email and social media accounts, as well as other password-protected sites and applications, and possibly even photographs and documents.

Though only 100 tablets were affected, Motorola is taking some pains to right this wrong.

[ Motorola's goof pales in comparison to these industry missteps. See 12 Epic Tech Fails Of 2011
. ]

First, Motorola is offering customers who purchased a Motorola Xoom Wi-Fi tablet between March and October 2011–and then returned it–a complimentary two-year membership of Experian’s ProtectMyID Alert to mitigate any risks. Experian provides access to consumer credit data, and can be used as a tool to make sure the accidentally shared data is not put to nefarious use. The Xoom was available from a number of retailers during that period, including Amazon.com, Best Buy, BJ’s Wholesale, eBay, Office Max, Radio Shack, Sam’s Club, Staples, and others. If you bought one from the aforementioned retailers and returned it, best give Motorola (and Experian) a call.

Second, Motorola wants the not-completely-wiped Xoom tablets back. Motorola is asking those who purchased refurbished Xoom’s from Woot.com between October and December 2011 to contact Motorola to see if it is among those affected. (Visit motorola.com/xoomreturn or call 1-800-734-5870 and select option 1.)

“Motorola sincerely regrets and apologizes for any inconvenience this situation has caused the affected customers,” the company said in a statement. “Motorola is committed to rigorous data protection practices in order to protect its customers, and will continue to take the necessary steps to achieve this objective.”

This type of thing shouldn’t happen, but it did. Motorola appears to be doing the right thing. Kudos to its team for getting the word out there and looking to protect the security of its customers. Of course, it would have been nice if Motorola noticed this whole foul-up a little sooner, as some of the affected devices have been in circulation for four or more months.

This could have been prevented by the users, however. Here’s how:

1. Factory reset. Every Android device can be returned to factory condition via the privacy tools. It’s pretty easy to do. I do it every time I send a review unit back to the manufacturer. This removes all the account data from all the apps, removes user-downloaded apps, and returns the device’s software to an “as-new” condition. It is in a slightly different spot on most Android devices, but is often located in: Settings – Privacy – Factory Data Reset.

2. Erase the memory card. This can be easy to forget. There’s a little check box in the factory reset process (but only some of the time) that asks if you want to erase the memory card, too. Make sure you check it. That way, apps that you’ve moved to the memory card–as well as photos, music files, documents, etc.–are erased. Better yet, pull the memory card out, stick it into a computer and reformat it. Better still, just take the memory card out altogether and keep it.

3. Change passwords often. If user data is somehow mysteriously intact after both users and the manufacturer refreshes a device, another tool to help keep yourself protected is to change up your password. For example, I change my Google Account password every month. This way, even if someone gets an old device of mine, they probably won’t be able to access my key information.

4. Encrypt your device. Not all devices offer encryption, but Motorola tablets definitely do. Encrypting the device is available through the security settings. The belief is that even if you reset an encrypted device to factory conditions, any user data left on the device would be so jumbled as to be unusable.

InformationWeek is surveying IT executives on global IT strategies. Upon completion of our survey, you will be eligible to enter a drawing to receive an Apple 16-GB iPad 2. Take our 2012 Global CIO Survey now. Survey ends Feb. 7.

The MetaFlows Security System (MSS) is composed of local software agents that can run on inexpensive off-the-shelf hardware and a cloud-based service where the results are stored.

The local MSS sensors capture network events and transmit the corresponding data to the company’s cloud system where they get analyzed and sorted by priority. Customers can inspect the results using a secure Web interface.

The sensors can be deployed as stand-alone appliances or they can be installed on the customer’s existing hardware using a Linux-based software package that contains proprietary and open source technology.

The software agent includes BotHunter, an IDS (intrusion detection system) software licensed from SRI International; the open source Snort IDS with generic signatures from the Emerging Threats project; the Flow, NetFlow, Sflow and CFlow network traffic monitoring plug-ins; log management tools compatible with OSSEC (Open Source Security) and MetaFlows proprietary applications.

The company also offers a package for setting up a honeypot client that acts as a decoy for internal network threats, although this is an optional feature.

One of MSS’ key benefits is the low cost associated with its deployment and maintenance when compared to traditional IDS products, said MetaFlows CEO Livio Ricciulli.

This is partly due to the use of open source software, but also because of improvements made to it by MetaFlows. One example is the modifications made by the company to the PF_RING packet capture library in order to support multithreaded Snort instances on multi-core processors.

This allows MetaFlows sensors to process 800M bps of sustained network throughput when using an eight-core Intel i7 CPU that costs around $1,000. In comparison, the max throughput that can be processed using a standard packet capture library with a single thread is 100M bps.

On the server side, the company has developed a threat prediction algorithm similar to the one used by Google‘s search engine to rank websites. This technology is used to prioritize events, therefore increasing the productivity of network security analysts.

According to Ricciulli, tests performed by the company showed that with a traditional IDS solution, an analyst has to inspect between 20 and 30 incidents before finding one that requires an action. However, because MetaFlows’ predictive algorithm uses anonymous statistics from all customers to determine the most serious events, an analyst will have to inspect only six or seven incidents in order to find an actionable one.

The nature of the platform, which allows data from sensors deployed in multiple computer networks of the same organization to be gathered and inspected in a single place, facilitates better collaboration between analysts.

The cost of a low-end IDS appliance is $20,000, Ricciulli said. The subscription for the service is $4,000 per year and the money spent by a company to pay an administrator for it is around $80,000 per year. In comparison, an MetaFlows appliance costs $2,000, the subscription is $99 per month and the administrator’s salary is estimated at $50,000.

MetaFlows is based in San Diego. The company has received research funding from the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation.

A group linked to the hacker network Anonymous on Saturday said it had attacked the Swedish government’s website, bringing it down for periods of time by overloading it with traffic.

CyberForce used Twitter to claim responsibility, saying “We have succeeded in the attack against the government.”

It also indicated it may launch more attacks at around midnight (2300 GMT) Saturday, saying “this op starts at 24.00,” but it was not immediately clear who the targets for those attacks may be.

The group said it had used a denial of service attack against the government, which essentially swamps a website with false users.

Government spokesman Jacob Lagercranser confirmed the website — used by all departments of Sweden’s government — had experienced some problems, but he declined to give further details, saying the government never comments on security issues.

“Periodically we’ve experienced some problems in getting in on it. We’re working on the problems,” he said. The site was up and running again later Saturday.

CyberForce describes itself as part of the hacking collective Anonymous, which drew international attention by hacking onto a private conference call by the FBI and Britain’s Scotland Yard, then publishing the roughly 15-minute-long recording of the call on the Internet on Friday.

In the past week, Saboteurs have stolen passwords and sensitive information on tipsters while hacking into the websites of several law enforcement agencies worldwide.

The alleged Swedish attack, launched at around midday local time, coincided with protests in Stockholm and Sweden’s second largest city Goteborg, demonstrating against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA.

In a tweet, CyberForce suggested the attack could be linked to those protests, saying “we’re not protesting on the (street), we’re protesting on the Internet.”

ACTA is a far-reaching agreement that aims to harmonize international standards on protecting the rights of those who produce music, movies, pharmaceuticals, fashion, and a range of other products that often fall victim to intellectual property theft.

Facebook’s billionaire CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls himself a hacker.

For most people, that word means something malicious – shady criminals who listen in on private voicemails, or anonymous villains who cripple websites and break into email accounts.

For Facebook, though, hacker means something different. It’s an ideal that permeates the company’s culture. It explains the push to try new ideas (even if they fail), and to promote new products quickly (even if they’re imperfect). The hacker approach has made Facebook one of the world’s most valuable Internet companies.

Hackers “believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete,” Zuckerberg explains. “They just have to go fix it – often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.”

Zuckerberg penned those words in a 479-word essay called “The Hacker Way”, which he included in the document the company filed with government regulators about its plans for an initial public offering. The company is seeking $5 billion from investors in a deal that could value Facebook at as much as $100 billion.

The 27-year-old, who has a $28.4 billion stake in the stock deal, uses the H-word 12 times in the essay; “shareholder” appears just once. Should Zuckerberg have left those references out of his IPO manifesto, knowing full-well it could scare off potential investors? He could easily have described Facebook as “nimble” or “agile” instead.

“Symbolically, it doesn’t bode well to Facebook and to potential investors,” says Robert D’Ovidio, an associate professor of criminal justice at Drexel University in Philadelphia who studies computer crime. “I think it shows maybe an immaturity on his part. He should definitely know better.”

By using the word, Zuckerberg is also trying to reclaim it. To him, Steve Jobs and the founders of many of the world’s biggest technology companies were hackers.

“The word `hacker’ has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers,” Zuckerberg writes. “In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done.”

To be fair, the meaning has become complicated. Bad hackers destroy things with evil intentions. They break into the voicemails of crime victims and celebrities in search of a hot news story. They breach security systems to steal credit card data. Just this week, members of the loose-knit group Anonymous hacked into law enforcement websites around the world and gained access to information about government informants and other sensitive information.

Good hackers break things, too, sometimes. But they do it in the name of innovation. They call themselves “white hat” hackers to counter the criminal “black hats.” Often, they’re hired to expose security vulnerabilities at big corporations. Kevin Mitnick, who was convicted and sent to prison in the 1990s for computer hacking, now works as a security consultant. It’s the flip side of his past life, when he spent years stealing secrets from some of the world’s largest corporations.

“I break into computers to find holes before the bad guys do,” he says.

To Mitnick, Zuckerberg’s “Hacker Way” is about finding clever ways to fix problems. It can also mean identifying a new use for something old.

Nathan Hamblen, who works for the website Meetup.com, says the best hacks are those that do something unexpected, something surprising that no one else has thought of.

The term “hacking” dates back more than half a century, when geeks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were tweaking telephone systems and computers.

“MIT was the Mesopotamia of hacking. That’s where hacking culture began,” says Steven Levy, the Wired Magazine writer who authored the 1984 book “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.”

The small community of hackers in the 1950s and `60s judged one another on their creative and technical abilities, and wore the term as a badge of honor, says Levy, in much the same way that Zuckerberg does today.

“They were the ones who did what you weren’t supposed to do on a computer,” Levy explains.

Some were pranksters, too. In the 1970s, before they founded Apple, Steve Jobs and his buddy Steve Wozniak figured out how to break into telephone systems and make free phone calls. In one infamous prank, the two Steves dialed up the Vatican to find out who would pick up.

“Wozniak pretended to be Henry Kissinger wanting to speak to the pope. `Ve are at de summit meeting in Moscow, and we need to talk to the pope,’ Woz intoned. He was told that it was 5:30 a.m. and the pope was sleeping,” writes Walter Isaacson in his recent biography of Jobs.

It wasn’t until the 1980s and `90s that hacking took a bad turn. Some blame Robert Morris, a computer science student who discovered a vulnerability in the Internet’s inner workings and unleashed the world’s first computer worm in 1988.

“He essentially brought the Internet to a grinding halt,” says D’Ovidio, the criminal justice professor. Morris was the first person charged under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that had been enacted two years earlier.

Then came movies like 1983′s “War Games,” which also fueled the public’s fear of hacking. In the film, a hacker unwittingly comes close to starting the next World War, thinking it’s all a computer game.

“It happened because of Hollywood and because there was no other word out there,” says Andrew Howard, 28, a research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. “Hacker is a cool word, right? It’s a neat-sounding word.”

The `80s and `90s were also a time when computers spread from geek circles to office cubicles and home desktops. They were becoming mainstream. But they were still mysterious to most people. They wondered: “How do they work? Is someone going to break into them?”

Zuckerberg’s hacker manifesto is a nod to Levy, who codified “The Hacker Ethic” in his book about the subculture. Among the principles: “Hackers should be judged by their hacking” and “Always yield to the hands-on imperative.”

The hands-on imperative is important to Facebook. Zuckerberg still spends hours writing computer code, even though he has hired hundreds of engineers.

That ethos helped Zuckerberg’s social network to prosper. As the once mighty MySpace stopped innovating, its users flocked to the cleaner, crisper, always-changing Facebook. News Corp. gave up on MySpace and sold it for $35 million last June. Meanwhile, Facebook’s user base ballooned to 845 million, even as the website has gone through changes and redesigns that have angered members and privacy advocates.

Zuckerberg and others may yet be able to clean up the term. Meetup’s Hamblen thinks it’s already happening.

“People aren’t as afraid of technology, which was driving the fear of hackers,” he says. “It was someone doing something with software that you don’t understand. As people become more comfortable with technology in general, then hacking becomes a way of seeing it as using it in a clever way.”

Technology companies, from the tiniest startups to those such as Facebook and online game maker Zynga, take the hacker ethic to heart. They host regular “hackathons,” where engineers pull caffeine-fueled all-nighters writing computer code, usually working together on projects that are not part of their day-to-day jobs. Some of Facebook’s biggest features, including chat, video and the new Timeline, came out of these hackathons, as Zuckerberg explained in the filing.

“Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win – not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people,” he writes.

This is the ethic that can lift fresh-faced college grads (or dropouts) to the highest echelons of the technology elite, or at least to a good job.

Cadir Lee, the chief technology officer at Zynga, the company behind the biggest games on Facebook, says he “absolutely” refers to himself as a hacker. Lee says, at Zynga the hacker way means being agile. It’s not the end of the world, say, if a game isn’t perfect when players first see it, or if it has a bug that needs to be fixed. Think of it as live TV, Lee suggests.

“The charm of `Saturday Night Live’ is that every once in a while you see a boom mic, or they forget their lines or crack up,” says Lee. “But it’s better to get something out there and entertain than to not have any show.”

For a founder of a highly touted Internet company undertaking an IPO, the “Letter to Shareholders” in the S-1 prospectus has become a rarefied form of performance art. Going public is the purest capitalist act — a deep and unambiguous genuflection to Mammon. But a founder’s letter provides an opportunity to explain that while the company is indeed tapping the rapacious forces of Wall Street to solicit investments on the open market, it’s not really about the billions of dollars set to tumble into the wallets of company executives, angel investors, venture capitalists, investment bankers and the squeegee guy who wiped the founder’s windshield and took his tip in stock instead of quarters.

It’s about making the world a better place.

Mark Zuckerberg aced the test. In his letter to investors who may be considering buying shares of Facebook to enhance their portfolios, he proclaims that as CEO — one who controls 57 percent of the voting stock — his focus is not reaping the highest profits, but profiting from a righteous mission. That mission is “rewire the way people spread and consume information.” The point of that epic rewiring job is to facilitate sharing — to convince people that sharing among themselves is not a surrender of privacy, but an act of empowerment. Not necessarily accumulating the biggest pile of cash.

It is that lofty impetus, Zuckerberg claims, that drives him and his company. Elsewhere in the prospectus, Facebook makes a case to raise $5 billion, and reveals that Facebook made a billion dollar profit last year from $3.71 billion in revenue. But founder’s letters like Zuckerberg’s are accompanied by a soundtrack of trilling cherubs, not ringing cash registers. (The prime example is Larry Page’s 2004 IPO message, the “Catcher in the Rye” of this genre.) “We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services,” writes Zuckerberg. “These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.”

I think Zuckerberg is sincere in this expression, at least the sharing part.   (It’s hard to make a case that money is secondary at that same time you’re establishing your net worth at upwards of $20 billion.) He has been consistent in pursuing this course, and, even more important, Facebook as a company has been consistent in pursuing a course true to the sharing principle. At every turn, Facebook has been pushing us to share more and more. Zuckerberg feels strongly that once we do this, we will not only like it, but we will realize the value that such sharing has for our lives and the world at large. You may disagree with his views, but you must understand them to know why Facebook does what it does.

After stating those principles, the letter takes an interesting turn, as Zuckerberg begins a rant about what he calls “The Hacker Way.”

I have to admit Zuckerberg’s treatment of hackers here is personally gratifying. Thirty years ago, I began writing a book about hackers, a subculture that most people did not know even existed. As I researched the book, I discovered a way of thinking, a way of being, shared among hackers of different generations. In my book Hackers, I codified this collective sense of values, calling it the Hacker Ethic. In many ways those implicit values are what basis of The Hacker Way that Zuckerberg describes in his letter.

For instance, one of the precepts of what I identified as the Hacker Ethic was, “Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, race, or position.” Zuckerberg writes in his letter, “Hacker culture is … extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win – not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.”

While elucidating the Hacker Ethic, I referred to the ”doing, not talking about it” aspect of hacking, calling the impulse “The Hands-On Imperative.” Zuckerberg addresses this, too. “Hacking is …an inherently hands-on and active discipline,” he writes.  And he has shaped his company to embody that value.

In my book, I wrote, “Hackers believe that essential lessons can be learned about systems—about the world—from taking things apart, seeing how they work and using this knowledge to create new and interesting things…. This is especially true when a hacker wants to fix something that (from his point of view) is broken and needs improvement.”

Zuckerberg writes, “Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.”

Obviously, I am pleased that Zuckerberg has identified the aspects of hacking that I wrote about in 1984 as key components in making a company successful. But what about the very first part of the Hacker Ethic, the one that continues to resonate in controversy? I am talking about a key characteristic of hackers as I saw them, an implicit belief that “information should be free.” (Later on some people clarified that this meant “free as in freedom, not as in beer.”)

When interviewing Zuckerberg for the 25th Anniversary of Hackers in late 2009, he explained to me how he saw this aspect of the Hacker Ethic. “From everything I read about hacker culture, that’s a very core part– information wants to be free, and all that,” he said. “I think our view [at Facebook] is maybe a little bit more pragmatic, that people need to have control over their information, that that is the way to eventually make it so that information is open. But fundamentally we view information being open as a very good thing.”

Indeed, many of the original hackers at MIT eschewed the traditional view of privacy—they hated passwords, for instance—on the basis that making information accessible promotes more general understanding of systems, the better to hack and improve those systems. Not exactly the same thing as letting everyone see your wedding pictures, or telling them that you’re listening to the new tUnE-YarDs record. But there is a genuine connection between the world-view of original hackers and the vision of Facebook. Zuckerberg, as a hacker, believes that sharing information increases its value.

Over the years, the term “hacker” has had a tough time, used most often to describe high-tech malfeasance. For instance, the vile behavior of Rupert Murdoch’s staffers who violated the phone and e-mail privacy of sources, is casually referred to as “hacking.” This is an insult to the proud hackers of yore, but there’s not much anyone can do about it. Language takes its own course. The good news is that more and more, people are using the term “hacker” in the original sense. And Zuckerberg’s letter will contribute to the term’s rehabilitation. “Hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done,” he writes. “Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.”

Even the best founder’s letters straddle the line between bombast and brilliance, and that is certainly the case in the Facebook S-1. But by elevating the status of hackers to a level that would presumably entice investors to take a stake in Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has done a great service to tech in general. Well played, Mr. Z.

Anonymous published the roughly 15-minute-long recording of the call on the Internet on Friday, gloating in a Twitter message that “the FBI might be curious how we’re able to continuously read their internal comms for some time now.”

The humiliating coup exposed a vulnerability that might have had more serious consequences had someone else been listening in on the line.

“A law enforcement agency using unencrypted, unsecure communications is a major fumble,” said Marcus Carey, who spent years securing communications for the U.S. National Security Agency before joining security-risk assessment firm Rapid7.

“What if this event was talking about some terrorist plot to blow up something and ‘they’ were listening in? It could’ve been much worse if it was related to an al-Qaida plot or something … So this is a lesson learned.”

The leak was one of a slew of Anonymous hacks that hit websites across the United States Friday, including in Boston, where the police site was defaced, and in Salt Lake City, where officials said that personal information of confidential informants and tipsters had been compromised.

Anonymous also claimed credit for defacing the Greek Justice Ministry’s website and stealing a mountain of data from the Virginia-based law firm that defended a U.S. Marine recently convicted for his role in the bloody 2005 raid in Iraq that became known as the Haditha massacre.

The hackers’ successful attempt to spy on the very people charged with tracking them down remained the most dramatic coup of the day, with sensitive police conversations broadcast across the world.

The FBI said the communication “was intended for law enforcement officers only and was illegally obtained,” but added that no FBI systems were breached. It said that “a criminal investigation is under way to identify and hold accountable those responsible.”

A law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the matter is under investigation, told The Associated Press that authorities were looking at the possibility the message was intercepted from the private email account of one of the dozens of invited participants — who hailed from the U.K., Ireland, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Sweden.

Anonymous published just such an email Friday, complete with the date, time and password needed to access the call.

Graham Cluley, an expert with data security company Sophos, said that anyone with that information could have “rung in and silently listened to the call just like Anonymous did.”

In Paris, a French police official who was briefed on the interception said it could prompt international law enforcement bodies to be more circumspect about sharing information in conference calls. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak on the record.

Scotland Yard said there was no immediate evidence their operations were compromised.

Amid jokes about a teenage hacking suspect (who one officer describes as “a bit of an idiot”) and lighthearted banter about McDonald’s, the investigators on the call discussed whether to delay the arrest of two hacking suspects to give the FBI more time to pursue its side of the investigation.

Updates were given on the status of inquiries stretching from Los Angeles and Baltimore to England and Ireland, with one member of Scotland Yard’s central e-crime unit telling the FBI that British police had identified a 15-year-old with possible connections to a recent breach at U.S. videogame company Valve Corp.

“Yeah that’s fantastic,” an FBI official said in response. “We actually do have a pending investigation looking into that compromise.”

An email to the FBI official leading the call was not immediately returned Friday, while the e-crime investigator referred questions to Scotland Yard’s press office. The press office confirmed it had someone on the call but said it would have no further comment.

Most sensitive appears to be discussion of what legal strategy to pursue in the cases of Ryan Cleary and Jake Davis, two British suspects linked to Anonymous. The U.K. police official on the call said prosecutors were secretly going to court to delay procedures in order to give the FBI more time pursue a related case.

When the FBI official thanked his U.K. counterpart for the favor, the Briton said cheerily: “We’re here to help!”

Karen Todner, a lawyer for Cleary, said the recording could be “incredibly sensitive” and warned that such data breaches had the potential to derail the police investigation.

“If they haven’t secured their email it could potentially prejudice the investigation,” she told the AP.

Anonymous, an amorphous collection of Internet enthusiasts, pranksters and activists, has increasingly focused its attention on law enforcement agencies in general and the FBI in particular.

The hackers’ targets have included the Church of Scientology, the music industry and financial companies such as Visa and MasterCard. It has recently expanded to include government, police and military targets.

Dozens of suspected members and supporters have been arrested across the world.