A 24-year-old Chinese hacker names Zhang has been arrested by the Chinese police after he was tracked down on account of years of illicit online activities and the extortion of several websites.

Zhang, who’s a high school drop out, originally got into hacking when he tried to buy a piece of armour in a Chinese MMO, but couldn’t afford to do so. He then looked up ways of getting it illegally, which is when he started hacking accounts and using other people’s money to buy stuff for himself.

While doing all this research, Zhang learned a lot about hacking, and then went on to extort several websites. He once took down a web design company, and then anonymously called the company and claimed responsibility, demanding $8000 for the restoration of the site. He went on to do the same with two other companies, and thus accumulated $24,000.

Over the course of 2012, Zhang extorted $32,000 from seven websites collectively in a similar fashion. He was trying to extort a Chinese game company the same way when the police tracked his bank accounts to him, while he was sitting in a cyber cafe, indulging in the very activities that have gotten him into this mess.

Needless to say, the police were shocked that this 24 year old high school drop out has caused so much trouble. Well, at least we can be glad they caught him.

Get the full story here [via Kotaku].

Ripten’s reporting that gamers who have used cheats for CoD: Black Ops and updated to the latest firmware version released by Sony are being banned by Treyarch from playing online.

Here’s what one of the so called “innocent” users had to say regarding this:

Hi i have been banned for black ops when i click online it says you have been Prem banned from B.O but i didnt do anything to get banned what i did my m8 said he was 15th yea and i said let me go on ur acc then if ur 15th so i just went on his acc and he was 15th and then deleted the user then the next day when i went on my account that message came up my psn is FoRzA-MoNsTeR I am 6th prestige on B.o legit my KD is 1.79 and my wins to losses is 1.14 and a 124 winstreak i did not boost at all please unban me.

You can read the full report over here

A group had hacked the Playstation 3 console under the name of  ‘fail0verflow’.  They have announced the codes will be released publicly allowing you to download PS3 games and play them on your PS3 with no problem.  I’m sure this won’t last for long, or will it?

Source

A thief apparently took off with a retail copy of the game from a printing press in Alabama, the game is still far off from release, with November 9 being its planned release date.

Set to be the biggest game launch in history, surpassing even Modern Warfare 2, this leak poses a great threat to the game’s selling prospects.

The thief according to reports have already sold several copies of the game to prospective hackers, with one of them even posting a picture of the game disk in the underground forums.

We hope Treyarch makes quick work of these thieves and they are busted before any possible leak can make it to torrent websites. Activision managed to prevent a similar leak of MW 2 by nabbing the culprits before the damage could be done.

You can read more on this here.