Officials at a South Korean security agency study an attack that disabled 32,000 computers.

American Express customers trying to gain access to their online accounts Thursday were met with blank screens or an ominous ancient type face. The company confirmed that its Web site had come under attack.

The assault, which took American Express offline for two hours, was the latest in an intensifying campaign of unusually powerful attacks on American financial institutions that began last September and have taken dozens of them offline intermittently, costing millions of dollars.

JPMorgan Chase was taken offline by a similar attack this month. And last week, a separate, aggressive attack incapacitated 32,000 computers at South Korea’s banks and television networks.

The culprits of these attacks, officials and experts say, appear intent on disabling financial transactions and operations.

Corporate leaders have long feared online attacks aimed at financial fraud or economic espionage, but now a new threat has taken hold: attackers, possibly with state backing, who seem bent on destruction.

“The attacks have changed from espionage to destruction,” said Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, a cybersecurity training organization. “Nations are actively testing how far they can go before we will respond.”

Security experts who studied the attacks said that it was part of the same campaign that took down the Web sites of JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and others over the last six months. A group that calls itself the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters has claimed responsibility for those attacks.

The group says it is retaliating for an anti-Islamic video posted on YouTube last fall. But American intelligence officials and industry investigators say they believe the group is a convenient cover for Iran. Just how tight the connection is — or whether the group is acting on direct orders from the Iranian government — is unclear. Government officials and bank executives have failed to produce a smoking gun.

North Korea is considered the most likely source of the attacks on South Korea, though investigators are struggling to follow the digital trail, a process that could take months. The North Korean government of Kim Jong-un has openly declared that it is seeking online targets in its neighbor to the south to exact economic damage.

Representatives of American Express confirmed that the company was under attack Thursday, but said that there was no evidence that customer data had been compromised. A representative of the Federal Bureau of Investigation did not respond to a request for comment on the American Express attack.

Spokesmen for JPMorgan Chase said they would not talk about the recent attack there, its origins or its consequences. JPMorgan has openly acknowledged previous denial of service attacks. But the size and severity of the most recent one apparently led it to reconsider.

The Obama administration has publicly urged companies to be more transparent about attacks, but often security experts and lawyers give the opposite advice.

The largest contingent of instigators of attacks in the private sector, government officials and researchers say, remains Chinese hackers intent on stealing corporate secrets.

The American and South Korean attacks underscore a growing fear that the two countries most worrisome to banks, oil producers and governments may be Iran and North Korea, not because of their skill but because of their brazenness. Neither country is considered a superstar in this area. The appeal of digital weapons is similar to that of nuclear capability: it is a way for an outgunned, outfinanced nation to even the playing field. “These countries are pursuing cyberweapons the same way they are pursuing nuclear weapons,” said James A. Lewis, a computer security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “It’s primitive; it’s not top of the line, but it’s good enough and they are committed to getting it.”

American officials are currently weighing their response options, but the issues involved are complex. At a meeting of banking executives, regulators and representatives from the departments of Homeland Security and Treasury last December, some pressed the United States to hit back at the hackers, while others argued that doing so would only lead to more aggressive attacks, according to two people who attended the meeting.

The difficulty of deterring such attacks was also the focus of a White House meeting this month with Mr. Obama and business leaders, including the chief executives Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase; Brian T. Moynihan of Bank of America; Rex W. Tillerson of Exxon Mobil; Randall L. Stephenson of AT&T and others.

Mr. Obama’s goal was to erode the business community’s intense opposition to federal legislation that would give the government oversight of how companies protect “critical infrastructure,” like banking systems and energy and cellphone networks. That opposition killed a bill last year, prompting Mr. Obama to sign an executive order promoting increased information-sharing with businesses.

“But I think we heard a new tone at this latest meeting,” an Obama aide said later. “Six months of unrelenting attacks have changed some views.”

Mr. Lewis, the computer security expert, agreed. “The Iranian attacks have tilted private sector opinion,” he said. “Hence the muted reaction to the executive order versus squeals of outrage. Companies are much more concerned about this and much more willing to see a government role.”

Neither Iran nor North Korea has shown anywhere near the subtlety and technique in online offensive skills that the United States and Israel demonstrated with Olympic Games, the ostensible effort to disable Iran’s nuclear enrichment plants with an online weapon that destabilized hundreds of centrifuges, destroying many of them. But after descriptions of that operation became public in the summer of 2010, Iran announced the creation of its own Cyber Corps.

North Korea has had hackers for years, some of whom are believed to be operating from, or through, China. Neither North Korea nor Iran is as focused on stealing data as they are determined to destroy it, experts contend.

When hackers believed by American intelligence officials to be Iranians hit the world’s largest oil producer, Saudi Aramco, last year, they did not just erase data on 30,000 Aramco computers; they replaced the data with an image of a burning American flag. In the assault on South Korea last week, some affected computers displayed an ominous image of skulls.

“This attack is as much a cyber-rampage as it is a cyberattack,” Rob Rachwald, a research director at FireEye, a computer security firm, said of the South Korea attacks.

In the past, such assaults typically occurred through a denial-of-service attack, in which hackers flood their target with Web traffic from networks of infected computers until it is overwhelmed and shuts down. One such case was a 2007 Russian attack on Estonia that affected its banks, the Parliament, ministries, newspapers and broadcasters.

With their campaign against American financial institutions, the hackers suspected of being Iranian have taken that kind of attack to the next level. Instead of using individual personal computers to fire Web traffic at each bank, they infected powerful, commercial data centers with sophisticated malware and directed them to simultaneously fire at each bank, giving them the horsepower to inflict a huge attack.

As a result, the hackers were able to take down the consumer banking sites of American Express, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and other banks with exponentially more traffic than hit Estonia in 2007.

In the attack on Saudi Aramco last year, the culprits did not mount that type of assault. Instead, they created malware designed for the greatest impact, coded to spread to as many computers as possible.

Likewise, the attacks last week on South Korean banks and broadcasters were far more sophisticated than coordinated denial-of-service attacks in 2009 that briefly took down the Web sites of South Korea’s president and its Defense Ministry. Such attacks were annoyances; they largely did not affect operations.

This time around in South Korea, however, the attackers engineered malware that could evade popular South Korean antivirus products, spread it to as many computer systems as possible, and inserted a “time bomb” to take out all the systems at once for greatest impact.

The biggest concern, Mr. Lewis said: “We don’t know how they make decisions. When you add erratic decision making, then you really have something to worry about.”

Copyright. 2013. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved

Sebastian Vettel has apologised to Red Bull team-mate Mark Webber for passing him against team orders to win the Malaysian Grand Prix.

The Red Bull drivers were told to hold station, with Webber ahead, after their final pit stops but Vettel ignored the call and overtook the Australian to win.

“I messed up. I would love to come up with a nice excuse or a nice story but I can’t. That’s the truth,” Vettel said.

Play media

 

Vettel tactic not acceptable – Christian Horner

“I can completely understand Mark’s frustration and the team not being happy.”

During the race, which Webber led from lap six, Vettel repeatedly went on the team radio to ask Red Bull to make Webber move over for him.

“Mark is too slow – get him out of the way. He is too slow,” he said at one point.

The team also repeatedly warned him to maintain a gap to Webber.

While Vettel was aggressively trying to pass Webber after their final pit stops, team principal Christian Horner went on the radio to say: “Seb, this is silly.”

But Vettel continued to attack and in the end Webber appeared to cede the position to the German, who passed him around the outside at Turn Four with 13 laps to go.

Webber said: “After the last stop the team told me the race was over and we turn the engines down [teams are limited to eight engines per season] and go to the end. The team made their decision. Seb made his own decision and he will have protection as usual.”

Vettel added: “I owe an explanation to him [Webber] and also to the whole team. Right now there is not much more I can explain. We talked about this many times before the race. It very rarely happens.

“Today it did and I should have translated the call into action. I just didn’t get the message. I got it. I heard it. But obviously no action followed because I misunderstood.”

When it was put to him that Webber had held station in similar situations in the past, Vettel said: “Now it is difficult to find the right words but I think in the past if we had a situation if we were close to each other we always used to fight.

“With the circumstances these days with the tyres not knowing how long you can go.

“It was an extremely big choice to [potentially] screw both of our races as in to not finish one-two, ignoring the order for a second and finishing eighth and ninth destroying the tyres in that two or three laps fighting, which we know can happen.

“I put myself above that decision today. I didn’t mean to. I can only say sorry, apologise.”

Play media

 

F1 Malaysian GP: Mark Webber ‘not satisfied’ with Sebastian Vettel

Asked if he was happy he won, Vettel said: “No, I’m not. As I said, I did a mistake. If I could undo it I would but I can’t so it is not a great feeling right now and surely tonight is not going to be easy to fall asleep. I owe a proper explanation and apology to Mark and the team.”

Red Bull motorsport chief Helmut Marko, a champion of Vettel’s within the team, said the situation had “got out of control”.

It is the latest of a series of controversial incidents between the two drivers over the last few years.

Webber added: “We have had a lot of history. I respect Seb. It is still very raw at the moment because we had a plan before the race…. I should probably stop now.

“It’s very, very, very hard for Seb to sit there when we are told to bring the car home safely. I turned the engine down and was reassured twice that we would not use the cars against each other.

“It’s very hard for people to understand the situation. They think they know what went on but they don’t.

“It puts a lot of heat on certain people. Unfortunately there is no rewind button but it will put some pressure on certain people. We have three weeks now before the next race and I will catch some waves on my board in Australia.”

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner said: “Drivers are drivers. We’ve seen it the other way around as well at races in the past between our two drivers. We will sit down and discuss it.

“Sebastian knows that it was wrong. He has apologised but we will sit down and discuss it.”

“They haven’t been bosom buddies for a few years now. They’re both competitors. What Sebastian did today wasn’t right. He acknowledged that. He has apologised, he took things into his own hands.

“His desire to win was greater than the team’s desire to avoid a situation like Istanbul a few years ago [when they crashed racing for the lead].”

Asked what Vettel meant when he said he hadn’t done it deliberately, Horner said: “He felt he hadn’t heard the call. That it was unclear to him what the instruction was. But then again we had the same thing in Brazil the other way around.

“He’s obviously chosen to hear what he wants to hear. He’s a race driver, he’s competitive, he’s hungry. He hasn’t achieved the championships he has by not pushing the limits and he has pushed that today with his team-mate and the team.”

On Dec. 15, 2012, a mild early-winter day, some 250 guests filed into St. Luke’s Episcopal, a Gothic-style stone church in East Hampton, N.Y., for the memorial service of Lisa de Kooning, the only child and sole heir of Willem de Kooning, the Dutch-born Abstract Expressionist. She had died three weeks earlier, on Nov. 23, at her vacation home on St. John in the United States Virgin Islands. She was 56.

Displayed by the pulpit, and tucked into the programs, was a photograph of a painting that depicted Lisa de Kooning dancing barefoot in a bright red dress. Like many images of her (Ms. de Kooning was no stranger to the flashbulbs of paparazzi in New York and East Hampton), this one was all about her smile: a high-wattage grin that often preceded an exuberant, Liza Minnelli-ish cackle.

The first eulogy was delivered by the New York curator Klaus Kertess. He recalled Lisa de Kooning’s assistance with several exhibitions he had staged of her father’s work, praising her as the “spirit of the shows.” He was followed by Anna Moss, Ms. de Kooning’s former neighbor in East Hampton, who fought back tears as she shared a few scenes from their childhood. Finally, Ms. de Kooning’s 17-year-old daughter, Lucy de Kooning Villeneuve, rose to speak.

Ms. Villeneuve, who inherited her mother’s white blonde hair and her straightforward manner, recounted the time she and her mother painted one of their favorite sayings, “There’s always another party,” on the walls of their house on St. John, and she summed up Ms. de Kooning as “just the best mom ever.” The simple service concluded with a recording of flutist Paula Robison’s rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

“Lisa always told Paula Robison that she wanted her to play at her funeral,” said Priscilla Morgan, an arts patron and longtime friend of the de Kooning family who organized the service. “I’m rather famed for the interesting people in my life, and Lisa was one of the most extraordinary people I’ve ever known. I’m having a terrible time about what happened to her.”

But what exactly had happened to Lisa de Kooning?

No one at the church that Saturday knew much about the circumstances of her death beyond the few sketchy details provided by early news reports. At 2:30 a.m. on Nov. 23, an unidentified man called 911 from Ms. de Kooning’s home overlooking Cruz Bay on St. John. He told police that he had escorted Ms. de Kooning from her living room to her bedroom after she had finished drinking some wine and left her there to lock up her home office. While he was doing so, he heard a loud noise, “like someone collapsing,” he said, and returned to find Ms. de Kooning lying on the floor outside her bedroom. When emergency medical technicians arrived, they could find no vital signs.

But if Ms. de Kooning’s death is something of a puzzle, it did not take everyone who knew her by surprise. Her life had not been without turmoil. “When I got the phone call about Lisa, the first thing I said was, ‘Is it drugs or is it alcohol?’ ” recalled a friend who asked to remain anonymous because of the family’s decision not to talk publicly about Ms. de Kooning’s death. “The answer was, ‘We don’t know.’ ”

Ms. de Kooning’s obituary in The New York Times contained a reference to a small useless cupboard her father built in the ceiling of the living room of the East Hampton cottage where she spent much of her childhood. She called it the “door that leads to nowhere.” Ms. de Kooning, who was 13 when her father installed the enigmatic cupboard, had already encountered her share of doors that lead to nowhere, and she would come across more in the decades that followed.

Johanna Lisbeth de Kooning was the product of a casual affair between Willem de Kooning and Joan Ward, an illustrator whom the artist had met at the Cedar Tavern in the Village. (At the time, Mr. de Kooning, then 51 and with a reputation as a womanizer, was separated from his wife, Elaine de Kooning.)

Lisa, as she was always known, was born with fair hair and a ruddy complexion; everyone said she looked Dutch, to her father’s delight. “There was no doubt that Bill de Kooning loved Lisa very much,” said Mark Stevens, an author, with Annalyn Swan, of “de Kooning: An American Master.” “But there was also no doubt he was never cut out to be a father in a stable domestic environment.”

The small shingled house in the East Hampton hamlet of Springs that the artist shared with Joan Ward and their daughter in the 1960s — he worked on his fierce, expressionistic paintings of women in a makeshift garage studio — was anything but the cozy nest Ms. Ward longed for. She hounded the artist to divorce Elaine de Kooning and make Lisa “legitimate”; he devoted much of his time out of the studio to drinking and pursuing an apparently endless supply of budding Dora Maars.

Lisa de Kooning found refuge in animals, caring for a pony named Freddy and ministering to rabbits, wild birds, and other creatures in need. In 1970, one year after Willem de Kooning built the door to nowhere, he and Joan Ward sent their daughter off to a boarding school in the Berkshires, but she chafed at its strict rules and left in the middle of her second year. Back in East Hampton she attended a local high school through the first half of 10th grade, then dropped out of school for good. The explanation Ms. de Kooning gave her father’s biographers was typically blunt: “I didn’t have anybody saying I should keep going.”

In 1972, at 16, Lisa de Kooning moved into an apartment her father owned on Third Avenue and 10th Street in the East Village. She hung out with N.Y.U. students and the runaways who flocked to St. Marks Place, and ultimately was taken in by an unlikely surrogate family.

“Her boyfriend was Sandy Alexander, the head of the New York chapter of the Hells Angels,” said Alex Kilgore, an actor whose mother was one of Mr. de Kooning’s more enduring girlfriends. “The Angels made her an honorary member.” A federal drug sting several years later turned up evidence that Ms. de Kooning had engaged in a number of drug-related conversations with members of the gang, but she was never charged. She also managed to work as an adoption counselor for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

By the mid-1970s, Willem de Kooning had turned his attention to large abstract landscapes, which he worked on in a soaring two-story studio he had designed for himself on several oak-studded acres in Springs. Elaine de Kooning had re-entered his life, moving into his studio in 1977. On uneasy terms with both her stepmother and her mother, who had developed a serious drinking problem of her own, Lisa de Kooning traveled to California, the Caribbean and Europe. Ms. Morgan introduced her to Bernard Pfriem, who ran the Lacoste School of the Arts in the south of France, and she spent a year at the school studying painting and sculpture. Her usual subjects were animals.

When she was 25, Ms. de Kooning returned to Springs, building a small prefab house for herself across the lawn from her father’s studio. (Willem de Kooning had begun his long descent into Alzheimer’s disease, but was still painting, in a pared-down, almost graphic style.) Ms. de Kooning received a generous allowance from him, and she freely indulged in the excesses of the time.

“An awful lot of Studio 54 and Xenon went on in those years,” said a friend from the 1980s who asked to remain anonymous as a condition of being interviewed. “I worked for a living and had to get up in the morning, but my phone would ring at 3 a.m. and it would be Lisa feeling some loneliness. I took lots and lots of those calls.”

On a trip to Jamaica in 1987, Ms. de Kooning met a French-Canadian landscaper named Christian Villeneuve on the beach. “She saw Christian from the back first and said, ‘That’s the man I’m going to marry,’ ” said Molly Barnes, an art dealer and another one of Willem de Kooning’s conquests. “From the front he looked just like a young version of her dad.”

Several months after Ms. de Kooning gave birth to their first daughter, Isabel, the couple were married at a small chapel in Springs. Willem de Kooning’s mental state was fragile by this time, but Lisa de Kooning believed he knew who his granddaughter was, and he liked to push her around in a stroller.

In 1989, following the death of Elaine de Kooning and in view of Willem de Kooning’s worsening condition, Lisa de Kooning filed a court petition asking that she be named a co-conservator — with John Eastman, the de Kooning family lawyer — of her father’s assets. (At the time, the hundreds of works in the artist’s possession were valued at $50 million to $150 million.) His court-appointed guardian and others challenged Ms. de Kooning’s fitness for that role, noting her spending habits and her freewheeling past. “But the court found that she was perfectly capable of acting as a co-conservator,” said John Silberman, her lawyer, “and she certainly stepped up to the plate.”

In the years preceding and following her father’s death in 1997, Ms. de Kooning applied herself to burnishing her father’s legacy. She established a foundation in his name and a trust for her own collection of his paintings, maintained his studio and set up an artist-in-residence program there, and helped with the staging of gallery and museum exhibitions of his work even as its value soared: Mr. de Kooning’s “Woman III” sold in 2006 for $137.5 million, making it the third most expensive painting ever to change hands.

Ms. de Kooning also thrived in her role as a mother. She built an airy addition to her house next to her father’s studio, and as her family grew to include three daughters, she and her husband provided them the nurturing home life in Springs that she had never enjoyed. “If you were a child, Lisa’s house was where you wanted to hang out,” said Rachael Horovitz, a film producer who, like Ms. de Kooning, was mentored by Ms. Morgan. “There were trampolines and kilns and always animals” (including a horse that learned to open the refrigerator door with its mouth).

For all her domestic success, Ms. de Kooning continued to battle her demons. In particular she struggled with alcohol, like her mother and father, getting sober and falling off, dropping in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous and rehab facilities. “We go to AA, a lot of us, because we have to find new parents to raise us properly,” said a friend of Ms. de Kooning’s who attended 12-step meetings in East Hampton with her. “Lisa would be absolutely humble in her program, and then something would happen and she’d disappear.”

Her problems were not helped by a rotating cast of hangers-on drawn to Ms. de Kooning’s handed-down fame and fortune. “People were constantly coming out of the woodwork,” Mr. Kilgore said. “There were always ‘yes’ people and people who came to ask her for things.”

Ms. de Kooning was generous, and she usually managed to put her resources to good use, whether covering a friend’s wedding expenses or supporting the Isamu Noguchi Foundation or Robert Wilson’s Watermill Foundation in the Hamptons. Wrapped in bright scarves and wielding her roar of a laugh, she was a disarming presence on the benefit circuit. She delighted in puncturing the pretensions of “Snob Hill” (her father’s name for the tonier precincts of East Hampton) by going barefoot to parties and extending her beach-club privileges to aging rock-star friends.

According to her friends, however, Ms. de Kooning’s social life strained her marriage. In 2002 she and Mr. Villeneuve divorced, and she eventually moved with her daughters to the city. She bought several town houses in the West Village and furnished the one they moved into with her father’s sculptures as well as paintings by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. She was known in the neighborhood for routinely taking in a homeless veteran and for leaving all her doors and windows open, whether she was home or not.

Over the years Ms. de Kooning continued to work on her own art: textured cast-bronze sculptures of elephants, bulls, rams and other beasts. In summer 2009, the Tripoli Gallery in Southampton held the only public exhibition of her work. (Calvin Klein bought an elephant.) According to Mr. Kilgore, the opening, which Ms. de Kooning attended with her daughter Lily, her dog and her parrot, was a bittersweet occasion for her. “She had an immense amount of talent,” he said, “but she knew what genius was and she could never free herself from her own eye.”

A lifelong beach lover, Lisa de Kooning maintained a vacation home in Florida for several years, and in 2008 she bought a hilltop residence in the Estate Enighed section of Cruz Bay on St. John. The two-story villa had a swimming pool and a generous patio overlooking the mountains and the turquoise, yacht-flecked harbor below. In St. John, Ms. de Kooning could snorkel or hike with her children and no one made any demands on her. But the island also represented an escape in a less benign sense, a place where the reggae fests go on for days and restaurant entrees are delivered with Jell-O shots.

Less than a year before Ms. de Kooning’s last trip to St. John, she was arrested on the island and charged with, among other things, driving under the influence, disregarding a stop sign and accelerating her black Jeep Wrangler in the direction of a St. John policeman.

In the first week of September 2012 Ms. de Kooning and an assistant boarded a plane at Long Island MacArthur Airport bound for Dominica. She enjoyed exploring the largely unspoiled island, and her plan was to spend some time there before going on to St. John. She told friends she would be back in New York for a board meeting in October. Some of those friends thought she looked trim and healthy before she left; others were concerned that she had lost an excessive amount of weight, perhaps because of prescription drugs. In any case, she did not come back, for a board meeting or any other occasion.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, Isabel de Kooning Villeneuve, Ms. de Kooning’s oldest daughter, flew down to St. John to spend the holiday with her mother. They shared a Thanksgiving dinner at the house at which no alcohol was consumed. Then Ms. Villeneuve returned to her hotel.

Acquaintances said the man who summoned the police later that night was an island resident filling in for Ms. de Kooning’s assistant. According to Melody Rames, the spokeswoman for the United States Virgin Islands Police Department, the investigation into Ms. de Kooning’s death by the department’s major crimes division is ongoing, pending the results of forensic testing by the F.B.I. laboratory.

In the end, the question of what happened to Lisa de Kooning may be beside the point. All the doors to nowhere may ultimately be less relevant than all the ones she managed to turn her back on.

Following the service in December there was a brief reception at the church. Then Lisa de Kooning’s family and friends made the 4 1/2-mile trip back to her father’s studio in Springs for lunch. “I spoke with Lisa during that journey,” said her friend from those club-going days in the 1980s. “And I told her: ‘Good for you that you fought the fight you fought. Because it had to have hurt a lot. And I just want to tell you one thing. You did a hell of a lot of good.’ ”

Copyright. 2013. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved

By Kelly Faircloth 3/14 5:13pm

Mr. Keys. (Photo: Twitter)

Power-Twitterer and Reuters deputy social media editor Matthew Keys has been indicted by the Justice Department. He stands accused of “conspiring with members of the hacker group ‘Anonymous’ to hack into and alter a Tribune Company website.” That would be the homepage of the Los Angeles Times.

All over Hollywood, overworked assistants were just dispatched to cobble together pitches due to hit theaters sometime in November 2013.

Before Reuters, Mr. Keys worked as a web producer for the Tribune Company-owned TV station KTXL FOX 40, in California. The DOJ says that in December 2010, after being “terminated” by Fox 40, he:

identified himself on an Internet chat forum as a former Tribune Company employee and provided members of Anonymous with a login and password to the Tribune Company server.  After providing log-in credentials, Keys allegedly encouraged the Anonymous members to disrupt the website.

The indictment, uploaded by the Huffington Post, has even more gory details. The feds say Mr. Keys burrowed into the IRC back channels of Anonymous with the nickname  “AESCracked” and handed them information on a silver platter:

Defendant MATTHEW KEYS then told the unidentified individuals that he was a former employee, proceeded to give them a username and passowrd, and told to “go fuck some shit up.”

When the hacker reported back with a mission accomplished:

sharpie: that was such a buzz having my edit
sharpie: on the LA Times
AESCracked: Nice

Meanwhile, our old friend Sabu pretty much outed Mr. Keys back in 2011, but no one noticed:

It’s actually frighteningly easy to commit a computer offense that could land you in the clink. But it won’t hurt the DOJ’s narrative that Mr. Keys has tweeted things like:

Anonymous has weighed in, blaming Sabu for snitching:

To add another layer of intrigue, BuzzFeed’s Rosie Gray points out that Mr. Keys also fed Gawker at least one log of his chatroom interactions with Anonymous.

Mr. Keys faces counts of conspiracy to transmit information to damage a protected computer, transmitting information to damage a protected computer and attempted transmission of information to damage a protected computer.

(Update, 5:45) Guess Mr. Keys knew what was coming. Gizmodo reports that just last night, he told a friend he suspected his days at Reuters were “numbered,” though he said it was “just a feeling.”

Developing

Follow Kelly Faircloth on Twitter or via RSS. kfaircloth@observer.com

Copyright. 2013. Observer.com All Rights Reserved

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VATICAN CITY — With a puff of white smoke from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel and to the cheers of thousands of rain-soaked faithful, a gathering of Catholic cardinals picked a new pope from among their midst on Wednesday — choosing the cardinal from Argentina, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the first leader of the church ever chosen from South America.

The new pope, 76, to be called Francis, the 266th pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, is also the first non-European leader of the church in more than 1,000 years.

“I would like to thank you for your embrace,” said the new pope, dressed in white, speaking from the white balcony on St. Peter’s Basilica as thousands of the faithful cheered joyously below. Francis thanked his fellow cardinals, saying they “have chosen one from far away, but here I am.”

“Habemus papam!,” members of the crowd shouted in Latin, waving umbrellas and flags. “We have a pope!” Others cried “Viva il Papa!”

“It was like waiting for the birth of a baby, only better, ” said a Roman man. A child sitting atop his father’s shoulders waved a crucifix.

Francis is the first pope not born in Europe since Columbus alighted in the New World. In choosing him, the cardinals sent a powerful message that the future of the Church lies in the Global South, home to the bulk of the world’s Catholics. One of Benedict’s abiding preoccupations was the rise of secularism in Europe, and he took the name Benedict after the founder of European monastic culture.

The new pope inherits a church wrestling with an array of challenges that intensified during his predecessor, Benedict XVI — from a priest shortage and growing competition from evangelical churches in the Southern Hemisphere where most of the world’s Catholics live, to a sexual abuse crisis that has undermined the church’s moral authority in the West, to difficulties governing the Vatican itself.

Benedict abruptly ended his troubled eight-year papacy last month, announcing he was no longer up to the rigors of the job. He became the first pontiff in 598 years to resign. The 115 cardinals who are under the age of 80 and eligible to vote chose their new leader after two days of voting.

Before beginning the voting by secret ballot in the Sistine Chapel on Tuesday, in a cloistered meeting known as a conclave, the cardinals swore an oath of secrecy in Latin, a rite designed to protect deliberations from outside scrutiny — and to protect cardinals from earthly influence as they seek divine guidance.

The conclave followed more than a week of intense, broader discussions among the world’s cardinals where they discussed the problems facing the church and their criteria for its next leader.

“We spoke among ourselves in an exceptional and free way, with great truth, about the lights, but also about shadows in the current situation of the Catholic Church,” Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna, a theologian known for his intellect and his pastoral touch, told reporters earlier this week.

“The pope’s election is something substantially different from a political election,” Cardinal Schönborn said, adding that the role was not “the chief executive of a multinational company, but the spiritual head of a community of believers.”

Indeed, Benedict was selected in 2005 as a caretaker after the momentous papacy of John Paul II, but the shy theologian appeared to show little inclination toward management. His papacy suffered from crises of communications — with Muslims, Jews and Anglicans — that, along with a sex abuse crisis that raged back to life in Europe in 2010, evolved into a crisis of governance.

Critics of Benedict’s secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, said he had difficulties in running the Vatican and appeared more interested in the Vatican’s ties to Italy than to the rest of the world. The Vatican is deeply concerned about the fate of Christians in the war-torn Middle East.

The new pope will also inherit power struggles over the management of the Vatican bank, which must continue a process of meeting international transparency standards or risk being shut out of the mainstream international banking system. In one of his final acts as pope, Benedict appointed a German aristocrat, Ernst von Freyberg, as the bank’s new president.

He will have to help make the Vatican bureaucracy — often seen as a hornet’s nest of infighting Italians — work more efficiently for the good of the church. After years in which Benedict and John Paul helped consolidate more power at the top, many liberal Catholics also hope that the next pope will also give local bishops’ conferences more decision-making power to help respond to the needs of the faithful.

The reform of the Roman Curia, which runs the Vatican, “is not conceptually hard, it’s hard on a political front but it will take five minutes for someone who has the strength. You get rid of the spoil system and that’s it,” said Alberto Melloni, the author of numerous books on the Vatican and the Second Vatican Council. The hard things are “if you want a permanent consultation of bishops’ conferences,” he added.

For Mr. Melloni, foreign policy and the church’s vision of Asia would be crucial to the next pope. “If Roman Catholicism was capable of learning Greek while it was speaking Aramaic, of learning Celtic while it was speaking Latin, now it either has to learn Chinese or ‘ciao,’” he said, using the Italian world for “goodbye.”

Ahead of the election of a new pope, cardinals said they were looking for “a pope that understands the problems of the Church at present” and who is strong enough to tackle them, said Cardinal Miloslav Vlk, the archbishop emeritus of Prague who participated in the general congregations but was not eligible to vote in a conclave.

He said those problems included reforming the Roman Curia, handling the pedophilia crisis and cleaning up the Vatican bank, which has been working to meet international transparency standards.

“He needs to be capable of solving these issues,” Cardinal Vlk said as he walked near the Vatican this week, adding that the next pope needs “to be open to the world, to the troubles of the world, to society, because evangelization is a primary task, to bring the Gospel to people.”

The sex abuse crisis remains a troubling issue for the church, especially in English-speaking countries where victims sued dioceses found to have moved around abusive priests.

On Wednesday, news reports in California showed that one cardinal elector, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, the former archbishop of Los Angeles, the diocese and an ex-priest had reach a settlement of almost $10 million in four child sexual abuse cases, according to the victims’ lawyers.

Becoming pope also has a human dimension. In one of his final speeches as pope before he retired on Feb. 18, Benedict said that his successor would need to be prepared to lose some of his privacy.