Ryan Cleary, an alleged member of the LulzSec hacking group, has been indicted on federal charges. The 20-year-old British man has been accused to breaching the websites of a Fox reality show and venerable news show and other sites to deface them or steal personal information, federal prosecutors said.
Computer security specialists say crimes called “corporate account takeovers” have become increasingly common, and small businesses are especially easy prey because many lack firewalls and monitoring systems. Gartner, an information technology research company, says regulators have not compiled statistics on the extent of the fraud, but the company estimates that more than 10 percent of small businesses have had funds stolen from their bank accounts — losses totaling more than $2 billion.
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) have started drafting a crowd-sourced digital bill of rights in hopes of preventing piecemeal laws like SOPA and CISPA from over-regulating the internet. The two have created a website called keeptheweb#open, where everyone is encouraged to contribute.
Social networking website LinkedIn Corp. said it will provide an additional layer of online security to its members following a data breach, while adding that stolen passwords were not published with corresponding email logins.
Apple Inc. must defend against a lawsuit accusing it of letting advertisers secretly track the activity of millions of mobile device users, a federal judge ruled, but Google Inc. and several other defendants were dismissed from the case. Owners of iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches may pursue claims against Apple under two California consumer protection laws, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California, said in a decision.
The organization tasked with regulating the Web’s domain names — that’s everything to the right of the dot in a URL — released its list detailing who has applied for new Web suffixes. Companies who applied for new addresses include Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft as well as prominent firms such as Macy’s, Wal-Mart and Tiffany.
The Justice Department is conducting a wide-ranging antitrust investigation into whether cable companies are acting improperly to quash nascent competition from online video, according to people familiar with the matter. Justice Department officials have spoken to several online video providers, including Netflix Inc. and Hulu LLC, those people said.
In the latest example of courts’ unease with social media, a federal judge has refused a request by Chase Bank to serve legal papers on an identity thief via Facebook. In an order issued in Manhattan, US District Judge John Keenan said “service by Facebook is unorthodox to say the least” and told the bank to instead place ads in local newspapers in and around the town of Hastings, New York.
Skout, a smartphone location-based dating app, has temporarily shut down its services for teens amid a series of rape allegations involving its underage users. "Until we can design better protections, we are temporarily shutting down the under-18 community," founder Christian Wiklund wrote on the company blog.
The International Trade Commission rejected HTC's effort to assert patents it obtained from Google against Apple. The ITC threw out five of the patents HTC got from Google last summer after Apple argued that HTC did not have the right to sue, patent blogger Florian Mueller wrote in a post.
The Federal Trade Commission assessed an $800,000 fine against Spokeo, a data collector that the commission said violated federal law by compiling and selling people’s personal information for use by potential employers in screening job applicants. The action is the F.T.C.’s first case addressing the sale of Internet and social media data for use in employment screening.
In an investigation that spanned from a Seattle restaurant to Romania, a 21-year-old Dutch national pleaded not guilty to federal computer hacking charges that include the theft of at least 44,000 credit card numbers. Federal prosecutors said David Benjamin Schrooten is a prominent figure known as "Fortezza" in the international hacking community who sold stolen credit card numbers in bulk through websites.
European officials are mounting a new push to clarify -- and enforce -- rules involving small Internet files that can be used to track users, exposing the slow progress of Europe's plan to implement far-reaching privacy rules. Digital-privacy agencies from the European Union's member countries hashed out new recommendations late last week for how to apply European data-privacy laws to so-called cookies, the common Internet files that websites use to remember things about users.
This just in from Geneva: The United Nations has no plans to seize control of the Internet. Internet conspiracy theorists will be disappointed. The latest one, fueled by “open Internet” groups, Internet companies like Google and some U.S. lawmakers, was that mouse-clicking bureaucrats at U.N. headquarters in Geneva, supported by governments suspicious of the United States, were scheming to take over the Internet itself.
Internet search provider Google and authors group Society Men of Letters of France have reached an agreement that ends a dispute dating back to 2006 over the publishing of snippets of books on the Internet. The deal puts an end to an appeal procedure, the two groups wrote in a joint statement.
Pinterest, the latest hot startup in social media, has hired one of Google's top lawyers to be its head of legal. Pinterest's interest in Michael Yang, Google's former deputy general counsel, likely came from a looming threat the company could soon be facing. The issue is that many of the pictures posted Pinterest are copyrighted and do not have their owners' approval to be pinned.
What has surprised customers and security experts alike about the data breach at LinkedIn is that a company that collects and profits from vast amounts of data had taken a bare-bones approach to protecting it. The breach highlights a disturbing truth about LinkedIn’s computer security: there isn’t much. Companies with customer data continue to gamble on their own computer security, even as the break-ins increase.
A trial court in India moved ahead with a criminal case against Microsoft Corp., Google Inc., Facebook Inc., Yahoo! Inc. and some other entities, by issuing summons to the global executives of these companies for allegedly failing to censor objectionable content from their websites. The criminal case against the firms follows a complaint from journalist Vinay Rai, who alleged offenses such as defamation, obscenity and promoting enmity among different groups on grounds of religion and race against these sites.
Samsung has sued the Australian patent commissioner, and by extension the Federal Government, in an attempt to force a review of patents key to its ongoing, high-profile battle with smartphone rival Apple. The South Korean manufacturer has battled Apple in Australian courts for nearly a year over attempts to block both companies' competing products from sale.
A woman has won court backing to force Facebook to reveal the identities of cyberbullies who targeted her with a string of abusive messages on the website. Nicola Brookes was granted a high court order after receiving "vicious and depraved" abuse on Facebook after she posted a comment in support of the former The X Factor contestant Frankie Cocozza.
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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.