A new report from McAfee -- In the Crossfire: Critical Infrastructure in the Age of Cyber War -- suggests that the use of cyber-attacks as a strategic weapon by governments and political organizations is on the rise. The survey follows closely on the heels of the attacks on Google and a number of other companies, which Google has declared were initiated by the government of China itself.
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is investigating 22 retailers for directing online shoppers to fee-based membership programs of discount clubs that often contain hidden charges. Cuomo sent subpoenas to websites for major retailers such as Barnes & Noble, Avon and Staples, which have deals with three companies that offer such discount programs, namely Webloyalty, Affinion/Trilegiant and Vertrue.
A revised legal settlement that would give Google the digital rights to millions of books remains under fire from rivals and other critics trying to persuade a judge to reject the agreement. The opposition mounted its latest attack on the deadline for filing objections with U.S. District Judge Denny Chin in New York.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says she has told China the United States is concerned about Chinese action that could infringe on Internet freedoms. Clinton told reporters she brought up tensions about alleged restrictions on the U.S.-based search engine Google when she met with her Chinese counterpart in London.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will press China's foreign minister on the issue of Internet freedom, a growing irritant in ties between the two powers, a senior U.S. official said. Clinton, in London for meetings on Yemen and Afghanistan, will meet Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi and is likely to raise the dispute, which has been brought into focus by U.S. search engine giant Google's threat to abandon the Chinese market over charges of government interference.
The four top recording companies made a settlement offer to Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the Minnesota woman who was found liable last summer of willful copyright infringement and ordered by a jury to pay $1.92 million in damages. And wasting little time, Thomas-Rasset's attorneys rejected the settlement offer almost immediately.
eHarmony Inc, which operates a website to help singles find relationships, said that it settled a class action lawsuit over same-sex matching. All claims against the company will be dismissed and a $2 million settlement fund will be established, eHarmony said, with $500,000 designated as a fund for claims by the class.
London police are setting up two specialist teams to deal with aspects of e-crime and ticketing fraud surrounding the 2012 Olympic Games. One of the teams will be dedicated to tackling e-crime related to the Olympics, such as attempted hacks on computer systems and fraud aimed at sponsors and prospective visitors.
In a report, Harvard assistant professor and security researcher Benjamin Edelman presented findings about a privacy flaw in the Google Toolbar, Web browser add-on software that makes Google Search more easily accessible through Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Google Inc. was asked by federal regulators to explain a $350 fee charged to people who drop a contract for the company's Nexus One phones on Deutsche-Telekom AG's T-Mobile network. The request came in letters sent by the Federal Communications Commission, which also asked AT&T Inc., Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp. about fees charged to customers who leave wireless contracts early.
China's most popular search engine Baidu has been cleared of piracy in a dispute with the music industry, the IFPI trade body for the music sector said. The IFPI said it was very disappointed with the ruling after a court in China decided that the search engine had not broken rules by linking to music downloads that infringe copyright.
The nation's escalating cyberbattles have outpaced the rush to find a deterrent, something equivalent to the cold-war-era strategy of threatening nuclear retaliation. So far, despite millions of dollars spent on studies, that quest has failed.
The Department of Transportation planned to announce new rules that will prohibit interstate commercial truckers and bus drivers from sending text messages while they are operating moving vehicles. Truckers and bus drivers who violate the rules, which are effective immediately, face civil or criminal fines of up to $2,750.
A Nebraska man has agreed to plead guilty in federal court in Los Angeles for his role in a denial-of-service attack against Church of Scientology websites, say prosecutors. Brian Thomas Mettenbrink of Grand Island, Neb., helped bring down the sites in January 2008 as part of the underground group Anonymous, according to court documents.
New York City can't use a federal racketeering law to accuse discount cigarette retailers of evading hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes on Internet sales, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled. The nation's highest court, voting 5-3, threw out the city's claims under the U.S. Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act in lawsuits filed in 2003 and 2004.
Many organizations are focused on stopping random hackers and blocking pornography when they should be concerned with bigger threats from professional cybercriminals, according to a new cybersecurity report. In a survey conducted last year of 523 IT and security managers, top-level executives, and law enforcement personnel, hackers were rated the biggest threat, followed by insiders and foreign entities -- probably because hackers are the "noisiest and easiest to detect," the 2010 CyberSecurity Watch Survey concluded.
The sites of Chinese Human Rights Defenders and four related groups were targeted by cyberattacks, the organization said. A distributed denial of service attack paralyzed the Chinese Human Rights Defenders site for about 16 hours, the organization said.
Even if its stand against censorship leads it to close its search engine in China, Google Inc. still hopes to maintain other key operations in the world's most populous Internet market. Google is negotiating to keep its research center in China, an advertising sales team that generates most of the company's revenue in the country and a fledgling mobile phone business as the company navigates the delicate negotiations with the government.
A tidal wave of spam has been predicted this year as cyber criminals are increasingly targeting social networks such as Facebook. The networking computer company Cisco estimated that worldwide spam volumes this year could rise by 30 to 40 percent compared with 2009.
Motorola has asked U.S. regulators to bar Research In Motion from the U.S. sale of its products, accusing the BlackBerry maker of infringing on five Motorola technology patents. Motorola, which has been losing market share to Canada's RIM for years, said most of RIM's products infringe on at least one of the patents, which cover technology for Wi-Fi, application management, user interface and power management.
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The GigaLaw Firm helps companies of all sizes protect their brands online, using domain name dispute policies – such as the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) – and other legal tools available to copyright and trademark owners on the Internet.