Computer attack techniques demonstrated in recent months highlight the danger to operators of power plants, water systems and other critical infrastructure around the world. "Things that sounded extremely unlikely a few years ago are now coming along," said Scott Borg, director of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a nonprofit group that helps the U.S. government prepare for future attacks.
Local reviews site Yelp Inc. has been cleared by a federal judge in a proposed class-action suit claiming the company extorted businesses into advertising. U.S. District Judge Edward Chen dismissed two suits filed last year by businesses that alleged Yelp threatened to degrade their ratings if they didn't advertise on the site.
Research In Motion Ltd. has set up a facility in Mumbai to help the Indian government carry out lawful surveillance of its BlackBerry services, according to people familiar with the matter, but the move hasn't fully satisfied India's appetite for access to messages on the popular smartphones. Last year, India threatened to shut down BlackBerry encrypted email and instant messaging services because it couldn't wiretap them.
Facebook said that hackers using stolen username and password credentials try to break into at least 600,000 accounts every day on the mammoth social networking site. The revelation was buried in a new security announcement issued by the company describing the virtues of its new "Trusted Friends" password restoration technique.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, the California Democrat whose district includes the heart of Silicon Valley, is preparing to lead congressional opposition to the new Stop Online Piracy Act. The antipiracy legislation, introduced in the House of Representatives to the applause of lobbyists for Hollywood and other large content holders, is designed to make allegedly copyright-infringing Web sites, sometimes called "rogue" Web sites, virtually disappear from the Internet.
Computer hackers, possibly from the Chinese military, interfered with two U.S. government satellites four times in 2007 and 2008 through a ground station in Norway, according to a congressional commission. The intrusions on the satellites, used for earth climate and terrain observation, underscore the potential danger posed by hackers, according to excerpts from the final draft of the annual report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
Consumers in the United States and Canada have sued Research in Motion for a days-long service outage on BlackBerry devices that rippled across the world earlier this month. The U.S. lawsuit, filed in federal court in Santa Ana, California, was brought on behalf of all U.S. BlackBerry owners with an active service agreement at the time of the email, internet and messaging interruptions.
A massive cyberattack that led to a vulnerability in RSA's SecurID tags earlier this year also victimized Google, Facebook, Microsoft and many other big-named companies, according to a new analysis. A list of 760 organizations that were attacked was presented to Congress recently and published by security analyst Brian Krebs on his blog.
All Americans will have broadband access to Internet and telephone services by the end of the decade under new rules adopted by U.S. regulators. The rules also reform a broken system of phone charges fraught with inefficiency and should result in $2.2 billion in savings passed down to consumers, the Federal Communications Commission estimates.
Whether spooked by popular uprisings worldwide, a coming leadership transition at home or their own citizens’ increasingly provocative tastes, Communist leaders in China are proposing new limits on media and Internet freedoms that include some of the most restrictive measures in years. Party leaders signaled new curbs on China’s short-message, Twitter-like microblogs, an Internet sensation that has mushroomed in less than two years into a major — and difficult to control — source of whistle-blowing.
The National Security Agency, a secretive arm of the U.S. military, has begun providing Wall Street banks with intelligence on foreign hackers, a sign of growing U.S. fears of financial sabotage. The assistance from the agency that conducts electronic spying overseas is part of an effort by American banks and other financial firms to get help from the U.S. military and private defense contractors to fend off cyber attacks, according to interviews with U.S. officials, security experts and defense industry executives.
Microsoft said that a Czech Republic-based provider of free domains has agreed to pull the plug on botnet activities using his subdomains, as part of a settlement of a lawsuit the software giant filed in September to shut down the Kelihos botnet. The suit, filed in federal court in Virginia, named Dominique Alexander Piatti and his domain company, Dotfree Group SRO, as defendants, alleging that they were involved in hosting the Kelihos botnet.
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Microsoft settles suit against alleged botnet hoster Elinor Mills by Elinor Mills October 26, 2011 1:20 PM PDT
Microsoft said today that a Czech Republic-based provider of free domains has agreed to pull the plug on botnet activities using his subdomains, as part of a settlement of a lawsuit the software giant filed in September to shut down the Kelihos botnet.
The suit, filed in federal court in Virginia, named Dominique Alexander Piatti and his domain company, Dotfree Group SRO, as defendants, alleging that they were involved in hosting the Kelihos botnet. Infected computers in that operation, also known as "Waledac 2.0" after a previous botnet that Microsoft shut down last year, were used to send unregulated pharmaceutical and other spam, to harvest e-mails and passwords, to conduct fraudulent stock scams and, in some cases, to promote sites dealing with sexual exploitation of children. Subdomains also were allegedly used to spread the MacDefender scareware.
"Since the Kelihos takedown, we have been in talks with Mr. Piatti and dotFREE Group s.r.o. and, after reviewing the evidence voluntarily provided by Mr. Piatti, we believe that neither he nor his business were involved in controlling the subdomains used to host the Kelihos botnet. Rather, the controllers of the Kelihos botnet leveraged the subdomain services offered by Mr. Piatti's cz.cc domain," Richard Domingues Boscovich, senior attorney for Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, wrote in a blog post.
As part of the settlement, Piatti has agreed to delete or transfer to Microsoft all the subdomains that were used to operate the botnet or for other illegitimate purposes, according to Boscovich. Piatti and his company also have agreed to work with Microsoft to prevent abuse of free subdomains and to establish a secure free top level domain going forward, he said.
"By gaining control of the subdomains, we are afforded an inside look at the Kelihos botnet, giving us the opportunity to learn which unique IP addresses are infected with the botnet's malware," Boscovich wrote.
Meanwhile, the lawsuit against the 22 other unnamed defendants is pending, Microsoft said.
The Kelihos botnet comprised about 41,000 infected computers worldwide and was capable of sending 3.8 billion spam e-mails per day, according to Microsoft.
Microsoft has been aggressive in moving to put botnets out of business. Kelihos is the third botnet--following Waledac, and Rustock earlier this year--that Microsoft has taken down using legal and technical measures. Elinor Mills
Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service, and the Associated Press.
Topics: Security, Spam, Corporate and legal Tags: botnet, dotFree, Kelihos, Microsoft, lawsuit
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2 comments Join the conversation!Add your comment (Log in or register) Comments 1-2 of 2
That'll teach them to mess around with Microsoft's walled gardens...
Then again, Microsoft used the Walls of Jericho as the inspiration for their security features... Posted by solitare_pax (6592 comments ) October 26, 2011 2:44 PM (PDT) Like Reply Link Flag E-mail
Best thing MS has ever done. Why are we not seeing other large tech companies joining in on this? Why is it left to just MS to carry the ball on this? All the big tech companies that sell MS software with their products should be in on this too.
Wouldn't hurt other computer companies to help out here as well. Spam isn't just a Windows problem. (no fanboy comments please). Posted by Mergatroid Mania (4373 comments ) October 26, 2011 2:50 PM (PDT) Like Reply Link Flag E-mail
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About InSecurity Complex
Elinor Mills became fascinated with hacker culture when she was sent to Las Vegas to cover DefCon in 1995. Since then, script kiddies have given way to cyber criminals targeting bank passwords, and privacy risks are everywhere, from Google to Facebook and the iPhone. InSecurity Complex keeps tabs on the flaws, the foibles, and the fixes.
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Just one week after Research In Motion announced its BBX operating system for BlackBerry phones and tablets, the company is facing a lawsuit over the name of the new software from Basis International. The Albuquerque-based software company says that since 1985 it has used BBx as shorthand for its Business Basic eXtended line of software developer tools.
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