Security

TOSBack is a new site created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation that tracks terms of service (TOS) agreements on major websites such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, eBay, Apple, and WordPress. In the past, some major social media sites have instituted TOS agreements that alarmed users and raised questions about their …

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 …

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 …

The Public Interest Registry (PIR), the non-profit organization responsible for managing .org top-level domains (TLD), will announce today that it is adopting DNS security extensions called DNSSEC. Domain Name System Security Extensions is a set of extensions that helps domain name systems (DNS) verify the integrity and security of data. …

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 …