U.S. junk e-mailers sent more spam than those in any other country during the first quarter, a security company recently reported, although China is hot on America’s heels.
According to U.K.-based Sophos, U.S. senders accounted for 23.1 percent of the world’s spam in 2006’s first three months. Chinese spammers sent 21.9 percent of global junk mail during the same period.
Mozilla Corp. developers have yanked one of the most prominent features from the next version of their Firefox browser after deciding that it can’t be finished in time.
The feature, dubbed “Places,” was to be a rewrite of Firefox’s bookmarking system, and would have allowed users to search through both bookmarks and the browsing history log to locate sites. Places relies on SQLite, an open-source database engine, to store bookmarks and the history data.
A start-up security company on Friday unveiled a beta of zero-day exploit protection software that it claims will protect users’ PCs until they can apply patches from the likes of Microsoft.
SocketShield, which can be downloaded free-of-charge from the Web site of Exploit Prevention Labs, is a signature-based monitor that detects and blocks vulnerability exploits, not the worm or virus or spyware or Trojan horse payloads that traditional anti-virus software sniffs out.
Microsoft shifted the focus of its anti-piracy technology from Windows-only this week and began piloting a program that sniffs out counterfeit copies of Office, the application suite that is, after Windows client software, the company’s second-biggest money maker.
The movie and record industries have sent letters to 40 universities, asking them to take immediate action to stop piracy of films and music on campus networks.
The Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America said they sent the letters to college presidents in 25 states, alerting them of the illegal activity on campus local area networks.
Gary McKinnon, the British hacker who’s due to hear whether he will be extradited to the US on 10 May, rates his chances of avoiding trial in the States as only “50/50″.
McKinnon, 40, faces possible trial under US anti-terror laws over alleged attacks on military and NASA systems between 2001 and 2002.
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APRIL 27, 2006 (REUTERS) - To the U.S., he is a seriously dangerous man who put the nation’s security at risk by committing “the biggest military computer hack of all time.”
But Briton Gary McKinnon says he’s just an ordinary computer nerd who wanted to find out whether aliens and UFOs exist.
A new Trojan horse demands a $10.99 ransom payment to stop erasing files on the infected PC’s hard drive, a security firm said Thursday.
According to U.K.-based Sophos, the Ransom.a Trojan freezes the computer, then puts up a message saying it will delete files every half hour until the user sends $10.99 via Western Union to a designated account.
Microsoft confirmed Thursday that it plans to turn off half the firewall in Windows Vista when the new operating system ships later this year because it doesn’t think most users need all the firewall’s functionality or can handle its management.
Although Vista’s firewall will ship with both in- and outbound filtering capabilities, the latter will be disabled by default. Corporate users, however, can turn on outbound if they wish.
Delegates at Infosec gave a resounding dismissal to a motion supporting VoIP deployment. The debate, “this house believes that the business advantages of VoIP outweigh the security concerns” ended in a fairly unanimous thumbs down, which implied security professionals don’t think the technology is ready for big money corporate rollouts.
