The Syrian Electronic Army promised more attacks on Microsoft, and the hacking group is following through with its threat today. Just hours after Microsoft unveiled a redesigned Office blog, the SEA hacked and defaced the site multiple times. Several articles appeared on the site with the title "hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army," before being removed. The group's official Twitter account acknowledged the attack with screenshots of the administration panel for the Office blog, before taunting Microsoft that "changing the CMS will not help you if your employees are hacked and they don't know about that."

The latest attack comes just days after Microsoft revealed that Syrian Electronic Army hackers were able to access a "small number" of employee email accounts. Some details of internal conversations were posted at the same time Microsoft’s official news blog and Twitter account were compromised earlier this month. The Syrian Electronic Army also attacked the official Xbox support Twitter account, while the group managed to gain access to the official Skype blog and Twitter account on January 1st. The series of attacks are an embarrassing and painful reminder of how accounts can be compromised due to simple email phishing.

We’ve reached out to Microsoft for comment on the latest attacks, and we’ll update you accordingly.

Prior to 2007, Lucky Strike cigarettes were most likely to be purchased by rockabilly scenesters looking to complete their outfits, or drunks who just confirmed for the third time that, no, they’re out of all Camels except for Crushes. But then came the first episode of Mad Men, with all of Don Draper’s waxing lyrical on how Lucky Strike’s particular brand of carcinogen was deliciously “toasted.” Nearly seven years later, sales of Lucky Strike are up by 50 percent.

The Ivey Business Review suggests there’s a connection rather tentatively, noting that crediting Mad Men for driving Lucky Strike sales sounds like “typical advertising puffery” (womp-womp), but that it’s also hard to point to anything else that might be responsible. After all, the company hasn’t done anything remarkably different in terms of creating new products or infiltrating new markets—no more than any other brand, anyway—yet ...

Wearing Google Glass recently proved perilous for a movie patron in Columbus, Ohio. On Monday, The Gadgeteer posted a frightening story apparently from a member of the Glass Explorer program. An hour into watching Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit wearing his prescription version of Glass, he said, he'd been abruptly pulled from the theater and interrogated at length by "feds," who accused him of attempting to pirate the movie by recording it.

What followed was over an hour of the "feds" telling me I am not under arrest, and that this is a "voluntary interview", but if I choose not to cooperate bad things may happen to me (is it legal for authorities to threaten people like that?). [...] They wanted to know who I am, where I live, where I work, how much I’m making, how many computers I have at home, why am I recording the movie, who am I going to give the recording to, why don’t I just give up the guy up the chain, ’cause they are not interested in me. Over and over and over again.

After going through the photos on his device, the man says, the officers concluded that there'd been a misunderstanding, and theater owner AMC called a man from the "Movie Association," who gave him free passes to see the film again. But the man described himself as shaken by the incident, especially because he'd worn Glass to the theater before and had no trouble. The story initially seemed too dramatic to be true, but both AMC and the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement division have confirmed it. Here's what AMC public relations director Ryan Noonan told The Verge:

Movie theft is something we take very seriously, and our theater managers contact the Motion Picture Association of America any time it's suspected that someone may be illegally recording content on screen. While we're huge fans of technology and innovation, wearing a device that has the capability to record video is not appropriate at the movie theatre. At AMC Easton 30 last weekend, a guest was questioned for possible movie theft after he was identified wearing a recording device during a film. The presence of this recording device prompted an investigation by the MPAA, which was on site. The MPAA then contacted Homeland Security, which oversees movie theft. The investigation determined the guest was not recording content.

"Movie theft is something we take very seriously."

While the man initially described the people who interviewed him as FBI agents, they're believed to have actually come from ICE, which has the authority to go after counterfeiters and movie pirates. ICE spokesperson Khaalid Walls gave the following statement, issued to the The Washington Post and other outlets:

On Jan. 18, special agents with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations and local authorities briefly interviewed a man suspected of using an electronic recording device to record a film at an AMC theater in Columbus. The man, who voluntarily answered questions, confirmed to authorities that the suspected recording device was also a pair of prescription eyeglasses in which the recording function had been inactive. No further action was taken.

Movie "camming" has become a huge focus in the past few years, with theaters monitoring patrons for cameras or microphones. A man convicted of helping record films in theaters and release them online received a 40-month jail sentence in 2012. While you can get around Glass' recording limits with some hacking, though, it's hardly designed for long-term recording, and if the glasses were prescription lenses fitted with the Glass device, the man didn't just leave them on for aesthetics or convenience. "I didn't even think about wearing my old pair of glasses to the movie, and I didn't have my old glasses with me," he told Phandroid in a followup interview. "I always carry an 'emergency pair' in my car, but the car was in the parking lot."

He also says theater employees had asked about his glasses in the past and never complained about him wearing them or asked him to take them off. Instead, he describes agents roughly yanking the glasses off his face during the film and five to ten cops and security guards waiting outside the theater, though ICE didn't immediately respond to a request to confirm these details. There are still some questions about the case, including who's giving a more accurate picture of the questioning and why nobody at the theater seems to have complained during previous visits, but what we know points to another case of wearable tech outpacing social norms — and, in this case, law enforcement. As the Glass user base expands, we may well see patrons being asked to prove that they've turned off their glasses as well as their cellphones.

The federal health insurance marketplace at Healthcare.gov still has major security issues according to some experts, including a flaw that allows user records to show up in Google results.

At least 70,000 records with personal identifying information including first and last names, addresses, and user names are accessible by using an advanced Google search and then tweaking the resulting URLs, according to David Kennedy, founder of the security firm TrustedSec.

Kennedy first testified about the issue before a Congressional committee in November, he says, but it still hasn't been resolved. It's just one of several issues he's identified with the site, and it's actually one of the easier ones to fix: Kennedy estimates it would take just a few days to hide the records.

Deeper issues, such as a loophole that allows hackers to easily impersonate links coming from Healthcare.gov, would take longer to fix. Kennedy and other security experts believe that new features are also introducing new problems as changes are made to the site. The website is less secure than 50 percent of all the sites on the internet according to Security Headers, a website that tests basic configuration issues.

The website is less secure than 50 percent of all the sites on the internet

Unfortunately, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) the Health Department agency responsible for Healthcare.gov's development, hasn't responded to Kennedy's disclosures. CMS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Healthcare.gov was supposed to allow Americans to shop for health insurance the way they might shop for a book on Amazon.com. Unfortunately, a rushed timeline and convoluted management lead to a disastrous launch that undermined public confidence in the website and the underlying health care reform law.

The administration had to scramble to get the site fixed and the lead contractor has been fired. But in getting the basic issues fixed, it appears that the tech team may have let security precautions fall behind. It's easier for hackers to steal identities than ever — consider the wealth of personal information recently made available through the Target hack — and the more sources of information that can be cross-referenced, the better things are for thieves.

"Everything that we've seen from the website is a symptomatic problem of a much larger issue of how they code the website so I'd be very concerned with using it," Kennedy says.