news aggregator

From China, with bugs

Federal authorities over the past fives year have seized more than $143m worth of counterfeit Cisco hardware and labels in a coordinated operation that's netted more than 700 seizures and 30 felony convictions, the Justice Department said Thursday.…

Bait, switch, exploit!

Researchers say they've devised a way to bypass protections built in to dozens of the most popular desktop anti-virus products, including those offered by McAfee, Trend Micro, AVG, and BitDefender.…

How did the followers of Internet phenom and 4Chan.org founder "moot" put him on top of the TIME 100 poll in 2009?

Cold caller from tropical climes

Yesterday I got a call from a chap claiming to be from Windows Support, letting me know that my computer was dangerously infected, and that only he could help.…

The University of California – Davis has stopped using Gmail for its 30,000-member staff and faculty body. The university was trying Gmail for faculty and staff with plans to roll out service to the entire campus. But school officials say this email system isn’t secure or private enough to meet their standards.

Let's say you look at porn. (You do.) This fact — not just the porn itself — belongs to you. There's no need for it to be a discoverable part of your digital life, or, god forbid, your digital legacy.

$650,000 per employee courtesy of CAN-SPAM

A small internet service provider has been awarded nearly $2.6m in a lawsuit it filed against a company that sent just under 25,000 spam messages over an 18-month period.…

Watch the bottom part of this footage. "He-Man and Skeletor Presumed Dead" = lolowned?

Apps secretly added to profiles

Updated Already under fire for taking liberties with users' privacy, Facebook was outed on Thursday as a distributor of unwanted applications, some of which install adware or are added to user profiles without permission.…

Google hopes to train developers to avoid common Web application security flaws with a new application full of security holes, and a tutorial to teach people to find them.

Bizarre LHC black hole scam also runs

Scammers are hoping to hoodwink travellers who were stranded by the volcanic ash cloud last month as fresh plumes have disrupted flights once more in the UK.…

*****

More than 58,000 images captured

A suburban Philadelphia school district secretly captured more than 58,000 images of students and their friends and family members as a result of an "overzealous" campaign to track the whereabouts of school-issued laptops, according to an independent report.…

Drawing fire from all sides

A proposed US congressional bill to regulate the collection of personal data is being almost universally panned, with privacy advocates arguing it's inadequate and pro-business groups saying it goes too far.…

When private conversations aren't

Facebook engineers on Wednesday disabled the site's live chat function after people outside the company discovered a bug that allowed users to eavesdrop on their friends' conversations.…

DNS spoofing patch released on the sly

Updated A recent security patch from Microsoft silently fixed two severe bugs that were never disclosed even though they posed a risk to many of its customers, a security researcher said.…

The US continues to insist that Canada, of all places, is in the same league as Russia and China when it comes to piracy problems. Canadians point out all the ways that copyright law is actually stronger in Canada (no time shifting!).

Repeated complaints lead to no action

Canadian Pharmacy spammers have set up shop on Twitter, staying online for weeks despite complaints from a leading security firm that would normally prompt action.…

Three Web sites belonging to the U.S. Department of the Treasury have been hacked to attack visitors with malicious software. Hackers targeted known bugs, including flaws in Adobe's Reader, to redirect visitors to a Web site in the Ukraine associated with similar attacks in the past.

Idiots have taken over the asylum

A USB memory stick containing personal information on patients and staff at a secure hospital near Falkirk has been found in a car park outside an Asda store in nearby Stenhousemuir.…