Archive for category News

Police in 14 European countries on Tuesday launched a series of raids against an online film pirating network, Swedish authorities said.

The major operation, organised after a two-year investigation by Belgian police, targetted a network called “The Scene”, which offered downloads of films before they were available on DVD, according to a statement by Swedish prosecutors.

Police targetted 48 sites across Europe that were part of the network, said Paul Pinter, a Swedish police officer from the minor crimes unit.

Belgian prosecutors will hold a briefing on the case on Wednesday.

In Sweden, police raided seven locations including one in a suburb of Stockholm containing servers used by file-sharing website The Pirate Bay and WikiLeaks, the whisteblowing website.

Pinter said the raids had “nothing to do” with WikiLeaks.

David Cameron is set to be quizzed over the newspaper phone-hacking row that is threatening to engulf his communications chief.

The Prime Minister is expected to be tackled on the explosive issue when he faces questions in the Commons for the first time since Parliament returned from its summer break.

The pressure on key Number 10 aide Andy Coulson mounted again on Tuesday when the Home Affairs Select Committee launched a fresh inquiry into allegations that News of the World reporters hacked into public figures’ phones while he was editor.

Committee chairman Keith Vaz announced the move after senior Scotland Yard officer John Yates indicated he was likely to speak to Mr Coulson as he considers whether to reopen the police probe.

And former NotW reporter Ross Hall told Wednesday’s Guardian he is willing to testify. Mr Hall was named in a previous inquiry as the man who transcribed hacked voicemail messages. Read the rest of this entry »

The fight to dismantle the prolific Waledac botnet appears to be over, Microsoft announced Wednesday.

A magistrate judge in the U.S. District Court of Eastern Virginia last week recommended the court permanently transfer ownership of the 276 domains behind Waledac to Microsoft, a move that would effectively stop the cybercriminals from ever leveraging the botnet again. The Waledac botnet is a network of tens of thousands of compromised computers used to spread malware, send spam and commit other cybercrimes.

The defendants in the case, who did not come forward in court but launched distributed denial-of-service attacks against the law firm that filed the lawsuit, have 14 days to object the latest ruling until it is deemed final, Microsoft said in a blog post Wednesday. Microsoft does not know the identities of the defendants. Read the rest of this entry »

Hackers create 57,000 new web pages every week in a bid to infect web users with malicious software.

The research arm of security firm Panda Security revealed that on average 375 keywords or brands are hijacked every week and used in the URLs of these malicious web pages.

Furthermore, 65 percent of these fake websites are designed to look like they belong to banks while 27 percent hope to fool web users into thinking they’re part of online auction sites including eBay.
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Using Facebook is the online equivalent of staring at yourself in the mirror, according to a study.

Those who spent more time updating their profile on the social networking site were more likely to be narcissists, said researchers.

Facebook provides an ideal setting for narcissists to monitor their appearance and how many ‘friends’ they have, the study said, as it allows them to thrive on ‘shallow’ relationships while avoiding genuine warmth and empathy.

They also tend to use the site for promoting themselves to friends or people they would like to meet, the study concluded. Read the rest of this entry »

Internet powerhouse Google is giving Web searchers the thrill of speed with a turbocharged engine that displays suggested Web links as fast as a person can type.

After two days of teasingly tinkering with the Google logo, or “doodle,” atop its home page, the California company ended the mystery by unveiling “Google Instant” — a zippier route to Web search results.

As users type in a query, the Google search box suggests terms and shows results for the top suggestion.

“Google Instant actually gets queries and gives you search results as you type and streams those results to your computer,” Google vice president of search products and user experience .”

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Just under two-thirds of all Internet users have been hit by some sort of cybercrime, and while most of them are angry about it, a surprisingly large percentage feel guilt too, according to a survey commissioned by Symantec.

In a cybercrime survey of just over 7,000 Internet users in 14 countries, researchers found that 65 percent of Internet users worldwide have already been victims. In the U.S., it’s 73 percent, but things are worse in China (83 percent), Brazil (76 percent) and India (also 76 percent).

Those results stood out to Norton Internet Safety Advocate Marian Merritt, who tracks this type of data for a living. “What we were really surprised by was, first of all, how common it was that people are being victimized by cybercrime,” she said.

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Microsoft is warning of a new type of scareware, dubbed Rogue:MSIL/Zeven, which identifies a user’s browser–whether it’s Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Firefox–and serves up a nearly perfect-looking version of the browser’s malware warning page.

Clicking on the malware warning takes a user to a website offering fake antivirus software known as “Win7 AV.” The website itself is also a ringer for Microsoft’s, down to the airy design and stock photographs of happy looking people in front of a laptop. But it’s a scam.

Microsoft is warning of a new type of scareware, dubbed Rogue:MSIL/Zeven, which identifies a user’s browser–whether it’s Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Firefox–and serves up a nearly perfect-looking version of the browser’s malware warning page.

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Twitter has been bitten by a hard-to-kill web-application bug that’s being actively exploited to steal users’ authentication credentials, a security expert said Tuesday.

A link that exploits the XSS, or cross-site scripting, vulnerability was included in tweets that sent users’ session cookies to two servers under the control of attackers, according to Stefan Tanase, a security researcher for Russian anti-virus provider Kaspersky. The tweets, written in Brazilian Portuguese, claimed a popular band suffered a “tragic accident” and offered additional information.