Cyber Crime

Domain name disputes rarely involve government entities, but in this case, the State of Florida recently filed a complaint with the WIPO to gain control over four domains: myfla.org, myfl.org, myfolrida.com and myforida.com. The state claims the names are confusingly similar to myflorida.com, the trademarked name of Florida’s official web …

The British government has announced plans to curb Internet piracy by restricting access of repeat offenders. In collaboration with the entertainment industry and Ofcom, Britain’s broadcasting regulator, the plan includes sending letters to customers who have been suspected of downloading illegal files, such as movies. Internet service providers would be …

As the United States awaits President Barack Obama’s important nomination of his cybersecurity advisor or “cyber czar”, a position that will report directly to him, speculation about who will be tapped for the position has begun. Among the people up for consideration is Microsoft’s security chief, Scott Charney, who was …

A week ago from today, the FTC shut down California web host Triple Fiber Network (3FN) for hosting illegal content, including child pornography, malware, and the infamous “Cutwail” botnet. In a press release riddled with broken English and grammatical errors, the company responded to the shutdown. Triple Fiber blasted the …

According to two reports released by the security company Symantec, phishers and spammers are coming up with new ways to attack their victims. In the past they almost exclusively relied on forged emails and web sites. Now, social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook can be added to their lists …

In an unexpected move, the French military took action against SnowTigers, a private BitTorrent site catering mainly to downloaders in France. The action came as a shock because private websites are not usually targeted by authorities. SnowTigers had more than 250,000 members, many of whom supported the site financially. The …

Earlier this week, the Federal Trade Commission shut down a California web hosting firm for involvement in spam operations. This is the first time the FTC has ever taken action against a hosting provider. The company, Triple Fiber Network, hosted some 15,000 websites at a data center in San Jose, …

On May 19, China experienced widespread Internet outages after hackers took down major DNS servers in a DoS (Denial of Service) attack. Chinese authorities now have the four hackers in custody following police investigations in the Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guandong provinces. The server in question was DNSPod, a Chinese DNS …

Following the lead of Barack Obama in the United States, the Conservative Party in the UK is looking to create a new Cybersecurity Minister position. The announcement was made by Conservative MP James Brokenshire of Hornchurch at a Microsoft computer forensics course attended by some 200 law enforcement officers. He …

InternetSafety.com, a company that specializes in web filtering, criticized Microsoft’s new Bing.com search engine today for its lax filtering of pornographic content, claiming it provides access to a “cornucopia of pornography” in its search results. Bing.com is the replacement for search engine Live.com, which had a 9.9% market share in …