Colin Powell denies affair with MEP after hacker gains access to 'personal' emails

Colin Powell, the former US secretary of state and army general, has been forced to deny he had an affair with a Romanian member of the European Parliament 30 years his junior. Mr Powell, 76, was confronted by a hacker named "Guccifer" who tried to publish personal emails between him and Corina Cretu, 45.

Ms Cretu was a spokesman for the Romanian government and met Mr Powell when he travelled to Bucharest with President George W Bush in 2002. In the emails, described as being "of a very personal nature" by Mr Powell, she refers to him as the love of her life, according to investigative website The Smoking Gun.

"The 2010-2011 emails would leave most readers with the clear impression that the forlorn Cretu is writing about the twilight of a lengthy romance," The Smoking Gun wrote, although it did not release the actual text.

Mr Powell has been married to his wife Alma for more than 50 years and the couple have two daughters and a son. The former commander said in a statement that he had stayed in touch with Ms Cretu by email since stepping down as US secretary of state in 2005. "Over time the emails became of a very personal nature, but did not result in an affair," Mr Powell said in a statement.

"Those types of emails ended a few years ago. There was no affair then and there is not one now." Mr Powell said he had offered Ms Cretu advice on finding a job at the UN but that he had not seen her in several years. "We remain friends and are in touch. I am pleased that she is having a successful career. I am pleased that she is recently and happily married," he said.

The emails came to light after Mr Powell was hacked by Guccifer, a prolific hacker who also targeted the email accounts of US officials, former FBI agents and friends and family of the Bushes. At one stage the hacker gained access to Mr Powell's Facebook page and began posting parts of the emails as well as linking to a more detailed archive of correspondence.


Mr Powell warned Ms Cretu that the hacker "may have lots of your emails" and said it would be "best to delete all between us". "In light of what was happening it seems obvious to ask Ms Cretu to delete emails," he told the Smoking Gun. Mr Powell admitted that the MEP had sent him "some bathing suit photos" as well as pictures of her family and her work but said there was "never anything improper".

"This was a friendship that electronically became very personal and then back to normal," he said. A picture from July 2011 shows the pair together in Washington. In her blog, Ms Cretu described him as "one of the most avid observers of global developments and also an old and good friend of Romania". Ms Cretu's office in Brussels could not be reached for comment and she did not respond to an email sent to an account listed on her website.

Hacker group Anonymous claims attack on Mercer firm

The international computer hacker network that calls itself Anonymous claimed Tuesday to have shut down the website of a Mercer County company that has been supplying the tear gas used by Egyptian forces to quell protests in that country.


The hackers, who say they struck in honor of the anniversary of the uprising in Bahrain on Feb. 14, 2011, the first of the "Arab spring" revolutions across the Middle East, said they wiped out the company's Web servers and released names, email passwords and identifying information of its employees.

UFC president hacked after scrapping with Anonymous

Dana White loves a good fight.
But the Ultimate Fighting Championship president may have second thoughts about mixing it up with members of the hacker collective Anonymous on Thursday night on Twitter, where he was on the receiving end of a brutal punch.
White's personal information, including his Social Security number, cellphone number and address, was published online just moments after the exchange, in which he defended his company's support of the controversial -- and now-shelved -- Stop Online Piracy Act.


The UFC's website was also hacked for the second time in a week.


The mixed-martial-arts promoter's parent company was a supporter of SOPA, which was intended to crack down on digital piracy. The company, Zuffa, says many of its fights are posted illegally online, either for free or with the pirate sites selling advertising on them.


The back-and-forth kicked off shortly after 9 p.m. when one of the more popular Twitter accounts associated with Anonymous called out White -- an avid Twitter user -- for comments he made in a recent interview.

'Anonymous' hackers attack Brazilian websites

RIO DE JANEIRO — The computer hacker group Anonymous attacked websites of Brazil's federal district Saturday as well as one belonging to a Brazilian singer to protest the forced closure of Megaupload.com.
Anonymous posted messages on Twitter describing attacks against hundreds of Brazilian sites that share the URL 'df.gov.br,' which are owned by the government of the federal capital in Rio de Janeiro.
The Federal District press office denied Saturday that the hackers succeeded in shutting down the websites.The Internet news site G1, owned by television network Globo, confirmed the early morning computer attacks but said the Federal District's 24-hour-a-day information technology team was able to stop them.

Anonymous hacker group plans for Sony attack?

Sony executives must be feeling the heat after hacker group Anonymous declared that they might just have a look at Sony’s servers to see if everything is up to par, probing for any defences that are ancient while looking out for weak links that they can exploit, no thanks to Sony’s declaration of support of SOPA. SC Magazine reports that Sony.com and the Sony Music store are the intended targets – I guess as long as they do not mess around with the PSN network, then the furore or outrage would not be that much, either. According to ‘hacktivists’ from the Anonymous

Hackers DDoS Israel websites, will expose Norton source code tomorrow

Fueled by anti-government sentiment, hackers continue their string of attacks against Israel. On Monday, a distributed denial of service attack was launched against two websites: the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and El Al, the national Israeli airline. The DDoS attack successfully brought down both online destinations.


As of the time of this writing, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange website states "Please try again later. The site is too busy right now." while El Al appears to have resumed normal operation.

Anonymous targets Israel as it joins war between hackers

Anonymous has posted what appear to be login details for Israeli SCADA industrial-control systems, a cyber attack that marks the politically minded group's entrance into the heated battle between Israeli and Saudi Arabian hackers that has already exposed thousands of credit card numbers and personal details.
A new Twitter account, @FuryOfAnon, posted a message Wednesday that said, "Who wanna have some fun with israeli scada systems." Included in the taunt was a Pastebin link showing what purport to be 10 IP addresses and logins for Israeli supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems.
Industrial-control facilities, including nuclear power and water treatment plants, use SCADA software to control and automate machinery. The infamous Stuxnet worm hijacked the SCADA system at an Iranian nuclear-fuel processing plant in July 2010.