The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is trying to figure out who sent five Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) laptop computers to West Virginia Governor Joe Mahchin a few weeks ago, with state officials worried that they may contain malicious software.

Sources familiar with the investigation say other states have been targeted too, with HP laptops mysteriously ordered for officials in 10 states.

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Flying home to New Jersey from Chicago after the first two days at his new job, Sergey Aleynikov was prepared for the usual inconveniences: a bumpy ride, a late arrival.

He was not expecting Special Agent Michael G. McSwain of the F.B.I.

At 9:20 p.m. on July 3, Mr. McSwain arrested Mr. Aleynikov, 39, at Newark Liberty Airport, accusing him of stealing software code from Goldman Sachs, his old employer.

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So, this is way off topic, I know, but really, I couldn’t stop myself.

As Bloomberg reports today, the SEC has sued National Lampoon, its CEO Daniel Laikin and three other people for allegedly participating in a plan to fraudulently manipulate trading in the company’s stock.

The SEC asserted in a civil suit filed in federal court in Philadelphia that Laikin paid kickbacks to a stock promoter and a witness cooperating with the FBI whom he believed had connections to “corrupt” brokers. Whoops! Fake mobsters!

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Up until recently, economies around the globe were on a fairly steady upward trajectory, a growth that put pricing pressure on some of the raw materials needed for both production and infrastructure. That pricing pressure has, in some cases, led to a bit of a black market where the materials are forcibly recycled through various forms of theft. Copper is one of these materials, and a variety of anecdotal news reports suggests that theft of copper from various places it’s in use has been an ongoing nuisance in the U.S. Now, the FBI has performed an analysis of the situation that suggests copper theft actually poses a serious risk to the national infrastructure.

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A St. Louis company managing prescription benefits of 50 million people said Thursday it called the FBI to investigate an extortion plot threatening to expose personal information, including prescriptions, of millions of its clients.

Express Scripts said it has received an anonymous letter containing the names of some 75 clients that includes dates of birth, Social Security numbers and their prescriptions. The letter threatens to expose millions of patient records if Express Scripts does not pay an undisclosed amount of money.

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Newsweek is reporting that computer networks of both the Obama and McCain campaigns were the targets of a sophisticated cyberattack in the run-up to the general election and, in the Obama case, “a serious amount of files” were downloaded from the system.

The Obama camp initially thought in midsummer that their system was infected by password-stealing malware uploaded to someone’s computer through a phishing attack. But after FBI and Secret Service agents investigated, they told staff they had a problem “way bigger than what you understand.”

The intrusion even led White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten to tell the Obama camp, “You have a real problem … and you have to deal with it.”

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DarkMarket.ws, an online watering hole for thousands of identify thieves, hackers and credit card swindlers, has been secretly run by an FBI cybercrime agent for the last two years, until its voluntary shutdown earlier this month, according to documents unearthed by a German radio network.

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The FBI has backed down on a secret request for information about a user of the Internet Archive digital library, thanks to a legal challenge from two prominent advocacy groups. The case, which was brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the archive, dates to last year but only became public on Wednesday. That’s because the type of request involved, known as a national security letter, is accompanied by a gag order that forbids the recipient from disclosing its existence or discussing it with anyone except his attorneys, who are also gagged. As a result of a settlement, the FBI agreed to withdraw the national security letter and to lift the gag order.

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