Citigroup said today that a cyber attack in May affected almost twice as many accounts as the bank’s figures had initially suggested. A total of 360,083 North American Citigroup credit card accounts were affected by the breach, the third-largest U.S. bank by assets.

Citigroup chatter

Chatter around Citigroup is currently at its highest point of the year.

Citigroup sentiment

Chatter around Citi or Citigroup is currently 34% negative, and the word hacker is appearing in more than 14% of conversations.

Citigroup is the latest in a growing list of companies to face cyber attacks in recent months, with Sony, Google Inc and Lockheed Martin all having suffered under hackers this year. Hacker group LulzSec, which recently claimed responsibility for high-profile attacks against Sony and Nintendo, says it successfully attacked the U.S. Senate’s website over the weekend.

After spending nearly $10 billion within a few weeks on acquisitions, we decided to run some social analysis on Intel.

On August 19, Intel acquired security-software maker McAfee for $7.68 billion in the largest deal of their 42-year history. Some questioned the decision, but Intel executives argued growing security dangers require new measures and described the acquisition as an essential step to design chips and other hardware that can protect systems better than software alone.

Less than two weeks later, Intel acquired chip maker Infineon’s Wireless Solutions Business on August 29 for $1.4 billion. The Infineon acquisition enables Intel to expand the company’s reach beyond the core PC and server businesses and into the mobile and wireless markets.

Overall chatter around Intel for the month of August 2010 peaked on 8/19, the day of the McAfee acquisition. Chatter on 8/19 was 68% higher than the day of the Infineon announcement 8/29.

Here’s a look at the overall sentiment trend chart for the month:

Interestingly, sentiment on August 19 was 85% positive, while sentiment on August 29 was only 70% positive (although Intel announced on August 28 that it cut its third-quarter revenue forecast, citing weaker-than-expected consumer demand for personal computers in mature markets.)

Overall the word McAfee was mentioned much more frequently in Intel posts than the word Infineon. The word McAfee appeared in nearly 70% of Intel related chatter on August 19.

The topic cloud for the month of August reveals generally positive conversation overall. Do you think these moves were wise for Intel?