Cyber Crime

America’s controversial Department of Homeland Security announced several new additions to its cybersecurity team this week. Heading the National Cybersecurity Center will be Philip Reitinger, who is also Deputy Undersecretary for the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD). He will hold both positions at the same time, a move which …

InformationWeek has released a report indicating that in 2007, Turkish hackers infiltrated two U.S. army web servers, redirecting traffic from them to their own Anti-American and Anti-Israeli web sites. The hackers go by the name ‘m0sted’ and used a vulnerability in Microsoft SQL server to initiate an SQL injection attack. …

Find yourself using too much bandwidth? While the pictures and video content many of us host on our sites use a fair bit of data transfer, a hidden threat may be hogging more resources than you realize. Also known as inline linking, hotlinking occurs when someone else uses a picture …

ICANN made quite a few policy updates last month. Most of it was just talk, with the non-profit saying they were going to explore “this and that,” or set up a committee to consider x and y. Either way, it’s nice to know that the folks in California are at …

Today has been a busy day for news stateside. According to celebrity news website Thirty Mile Zone, Mel Gibson’s Russian girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva, is suing her web host for cybersquatting. She claims that her host registered the domain OksanaGrigorieva.com and is using the site to spread lies about her. The …

Friday, President Obama confirmed our earlier report and announced the creation of a new cyber security coordinator post that will oversee the securing of “America’s digital infrastructure.” The person who takes this new post will report directly to the President and have his full support and consultation. “Our technological advantage …

President Barack Obama’s choice for U.S. Supreme Court justice is apparently well versed in cyberlaw. Tuesday, President Obama named Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice David Souter. Her experience with technology issues, particularly those related to the Internet, is most likely not a coincidence. According …

Computer security giant Symantec announced the release of its May 2009 MessageLabs Intelligence Report. Covering a wide variety of Internet threats, the report details some disturbing new trends. Most notably, spam has increased by 5.1% since April. It now accounts for 90.4% of email. Where you live depends on what …

The Washington Post reported this morning that the White House will soon announce plans to appoint a national cybersecurity adviser who will oversee strategies to protect the United States’ government-operated and private computer networks. Speaking under the condition of anonymity, a White House official said that the “cyber czar” will …

The APWG, a committee dedicated to combating Internet scams and fraud, released what they call the Global Phishing Survey today. The report, which analyzed more than 30,000 phishing websites in 2008, can be downloaded here (PDF). The organization measured the prevalence of a given domain using the metric “phishing attacks …