Yahoo said its email service recently fell victim to a coordinated cyberattack that resulted in the compromise of an undisclosed number of user accounts. The Sunnyvale, Calif., tech company said it has taken immediate action to protect users who were affected by the breach by prompting them to reset their passwords.
A cyber criminal ring targeting small retailers in 11 countries stole data on 49,000 payment cards using a malicious software known as "ChewBacca" before the operation was shut down, according to a cyber research firm. RSA FirstWatch disclosed the attacks on its website and said the firm's researchers uncovered the ring, whose victims included small companies in the United States, Russia, Canada and Australia.
Samsung sought to defeat Apple's bid for a permanent sales ban against some Samsung smartphones, arguing in court that Apple's request was an attempt to instill fear among telecom carriers and retailers that carry Samsung's products. At a hearing in federal court in San Jose, California, Samsung attorney Kathleen Sullivan told U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh that the injunction would give the iPhone maker an opening to come back to court quickly and argue that newer Samsung products should also be banned.
GoDaddy has acknowledged that one of its employees fell victim to a social engineering attack allowing a hacker to take over a customer's domain names and eventually extort a coveted Twitter user name from him. PayPal, which the victim claimed also played a role in the attack, denied the accusations. Naoki Hiroshima, a software engineer and creator of the Cocoyon location sharing mobile app, reported Wednesday in a blog post that a hacker successfully extorted him into giving up his single-letter Twitter user name, called @N, after first hijacking his domain names registered at GoDaddy, email address and Facebook account.
With two patent-related deals in less than a week, Google Inc. is shoring up its intellectual property portfolio. Google agreed to sell its Motorola Mobility handset division to Lenovo Group Ltd. for $2.9 billion, while holding onto most of the unit’s patent portfolio.
Law enforcement officials testified that virtual currencies like Bitcoin have opened up new avenues for crime that government has not been able to keep up with. The most forceful statements came from a prosecutor with the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, Richard B. Zabel, during the second day of hearings about virtual currencies held by New York’s top financial regulator, Benjamin M. Lawsky.
The official Angry Birds website was defaced by hackers following reports that U.S. and U.K. intelligence agencies have been collecting user information from the game and other popular mobile apps. Some users trying to access the www.angrybirds.com website were greeted by an image depicting the Angry Birds game characters accompanied by the text "Spying Birds."
As part of Israel's program to deal with rising cyber threats, the government is putting together a task force to help citizens and businesses cope. The country's National Cyber Bureau plans to establish cyber-emergency response teams this year that will specialize in handling different kinds of hacks, said Rami Efrati, the head of the bureau's civilian division.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder confirmed that the Justice Department was investigating the massive hacking of consumer data from retailer Target Corp during the holiday shopping season. Testifying at a U.S. Senate hearing, Holder said the department would seek not only to find the perpetrators of the breach, but also "any individuals and groups who exploit that data via credit card fraud."
Google is close to settling a three-year European antitrust probe with "much better" concessions to allay concerns over blocking rivals such as Microsoft from internet search results, two sources said. A settlement with the European Union's regulator would mean that Google, the world's biggest internet search engine, would escape a possible fine of as much as $5 billion or 10 percent of its 2012 revenue.
A Russian hacker who developed the widely used SpyEye banking trojan pleaded guilty to creating the malicious toolkit, one of the most popular hacking tools of the past two years. Aleksandr Andreevich Panin, known online as “Gribodemon” and “Harderman,” was convicted in Atlanta of conspiracy to commit wire and bank fraud, charging stemming from his role as the primary developer and distributor of a sophisticated toolkit that allowed thieves to steal millions of dollars from victims.
The British government can tap into the cables carrying the world’s web traffic at will and spy on what people are doing on some of the world’s most popular social media sites, including YouTube, all without the knowledge or consent of the companies. Documents taken from the National Security Agency by Edward Snowden and obtained by NBC News detail how British cyber spies demonstrated a pilot program to their U.S. partners in 2012 in which they were able to monitor YouTube in real time and collect addresses from the billions of videos watched daily, as well as some user information, for analysis.
The Court of Appeals in The Hague lifted a block on The Pirate Bay in the Netherlands because the measure was ineffective and disproportionate for two ISPs. The court overturned the January 2012 verdict of the The Hague District Court court that ordered ISPs Ziggo and XS4ALL to block the Pirate Bay.
Bitcoin proponent Cameron Winklevoss told regulators that potential regulation of the virtual currency "will play the biggest role in bitcoin's forthcoming evolution." In opening statements made at a hearing of the New York Department of Financial Services, Mr. Winklevoss also warned that "overregulation could cripple its development."
Samsung and Ericsson announced they have settled a patent dispute with a cross-licensing deal that will see some big checks being written to the Swedish networking firm. The deal will end all of the global patent disputes between the two firms, including complaints before the U.S. International Trade Commission and lawsuits in U.S. District Court in Texas.
The Obama administration says it will allow Internet companies to give customers a better idea of how often the government demands their information, but will not allow companies to disclose what is being collected or how much. The new rules — which have prompted Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook to drop their respective lawsuits before the nation’s secret surveillance court — also contain a provision that bars start-ups from revealing information about government requests for two years.
Movie director Quentin Tarantino filed a lawsuit accusing Gawker Media of facilitating copyright infringement after Gawker linked to an unproduced script that leaked onto the Internet last week. Furious that a first draft of "The Hateful Eight" was circulating on the Internet, Tarantino announced last week that the western would not be the next movie he filmed.
When a smartphone user opens Angry Birds, the popular game application, and starts slinging birds at chortling green pigs, spies may be lurking in the background to snatch data revealing the player’s location, age, sex and other personal information, according to secret British intelligence documents. In their globe-spanning surveillance for terrorism suspects and other targets, the National Security Agency and its British counterpart have been trying to exploit a basic byproduct of modern telecommunications: With each new generation of mobile phone technology, ever greater amounts of personal data pour onto networks where spies can pick it up.
Microsoft is renaming its SkyDrive cloud storage to OneDrive. The name change comes more than six months after Microsoft was forced to rename SkyDrive following a trademark case with British Sky Broadcasting Group (BSkyB).
An Indian Supreme Court hearing on whether the local unit of Google Inc. is liable for allegedly defamatory comments posted on its blogging site will help decide how Internet companies do business in the growing South Asian market. The Supreme Court was scheduled to start hearing arguments Monday from the U.S. technology company in a case brought by Visaka Industries Ltd.
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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.