A group of tech companies looking to replace passwords for online identity authentication gained a powerful ally Tuesday in the form of Google.

The consortium, called the Fast IDentity Online Alliance (FIDO), is working to develop standards-based alternatives for verifying a user's identity when trying to login to Web sites and online accounts. Formed in 2012, the group proposes specifications that will support a variety of authentication technologies, including biometrics such as fingerprint scanners and voice and facial recognition, as well as security tokens, near field communication, and one-time passwords.

The Web giant joins founding members Lenovo, PayPal, Nok Nok Labs, and Validity on the board, as well as chipmaker NXP and input device maker CrucialTec, which also joined the board Tuesday.

The Australian Federal Police has reportedly arrested a man who describes himself as the "leader" of the LulzSec hacking group.

The 24-year-old man was arrested on hacking charges Tuesday in the coastal town of Point Clare, according to ABC News Australia, which first reported the arrest. The report did not reveal that man's identity.

The arrest comes two weeks after three members of hacker group pleaded guilty in a British court to carrying out cyberattacks against various media and entertainment companies and the U.K. National Health Service.

Cyberwarfare incidences jumped sharply in 2012, Akamai said, with the number of distributed denial of service attacks more than tripling from the previous year.

Akamai, one of the world's largest globally distributed networks, said its customers reported being targeted by 768 DDoS attacks last year, more than three times as many as in 2011. The company's State of the Internet report released Tuesday also found that more than a third of those attacks targeted the commerce sector, while another 20 percent targeted enterprise customers.

"In many ways, DDoS has become the weapon of choice for multiple types of attackers, from political activists to criminals, and potentially even nation-states," Akamai said.

Akamai noted that, at this point in time, it's only counting attacks that were serious enough to require human interaction to combat them. Lower-level attacks, which are mitigated automatically with little or no interaction from Akamai or its customers, are not included in the total.

Germany's privacy regulator has fined Google 145,000 euros ($189,000) after the search giant illegally collected private Wi-Fi network data, including usernames, passwords and Web site results.

It amounts to a minor bluff for Google, but an overall win, as the fine represents about 0.002 percent of its total net profit in 2012.

The Twitter accounts for CBS News programs "60 Minutes" and "48 Hours" were used by hackers earlier today to send out messages accusing the U.S. of aiding terrorists, the network confirmed.

"We have experienced problems on Twitter accounts of #60Minutes & @48Hours; We apologize for the inconvenience; Twitter is resolving issues," read a tweet from @CBSNews. Read another from @60Minutes: "PLEASE NOTE: Our Twitter account was compromised earlier today. We are working with Twitter to resolve."

Bogus messages tweeted from the hacked accounts included this one from the @60Minutes account:

A security certificate problem triggered warnings not to use Bing over a secure Web connection Friday, and Microsoft said an issue with network service provider Akamai is to blame.

Browsers displayed prominent error messages and warnings at about 9 a.m. PT when visiting https://bing.com.

After the Boston Marathon bombings, police in the city made a plea for people with cell phone video and pictures to turn over their footage, adding to the hours of surveillance video from nearby businesses. But what would normally take investigators hundreds of hours to review can now take minutes or even seconds, thanks to technology like facial recognition. The software, which can help pick a person out of crowd, looks for differentiating features -- from the shape of a mouth to the ridge on a nose to the distance between a pair of eyes.

3VR in San Francisco has developed software that extracts information from video and then makes it searchable for its clients, which include retailers, banks, security firms, and law enforcement.

The video stream can come from surveillance cameras and smartphones. "We will identify each person and extract the facial biometrics of each person in the field of view, and we'll save a snapshot of that person," explains 3VR CEO Al Shipp.

Internet users are seeing less spam but more targeted attacks, according to security software company Symantec.

Looking at last year's security landscape, Symantec's Internet Security Threat Report 2013 found that traditional spam accounted for 69 percent of all e-mail in 2012, down from 75 percent in 2011. Yet, 30 billion spam messages are still sent on a daily basis.

Junk e-mails that hawk sex or dating products and services now account for 55 percent of all spam, taking the top spot away from pharmaceutical spam.

Internet users are seeing less spam but more targeted attacks, according to security software company Symantec.

Looking at last year's security landscape, Symantec's Internet Security Threat Report 2013 found that traditional spam accounted for 69 percent of all e-mail in 2012, down from 75 percent in 2011. Yet, 30 billion spam messages are still sent on a daily basis.

Junk e-mails that hawk sex or dating products and services now account for 55 percent of all spam, taking the top spot away from pharmaceutical spam.

Oracle will release today 128 fixes for security vulnerabilities that affect "hundreds" of its products.

The software giant and Java maker said in a pre-release announcement today that four of the patches include fixes for Oracle's flagship database product, which can be exploited remotely without the need for a username or password.

Also, 29 security fixes will arrive for Oracle Fusion Middleware, with 22 of these also for preventing attacks without the need for authentication.