But with its new search business, Defense Distributed goes beyond provocation to seek profit, too.

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According to Leshner, these mistakes are over-sharing information, not changing privacy settings, uploading inappropriate pictures, not understanding the places information can be distributed on the Web and not taking the time to search their own names.

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Despite their demonization in the press, hackers have traditionally distributed critical information about insecure products and used this information to search for better solutions, attendees said.

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"I think it's unprecedented that a large file such as this is going to be distributed en masse, " said Jonathan Heiliger, chief executive officer of Frontier GlobalCenter, which runs the Yahoo search engine.

CNN: Record traffic reported; government sites swamped