Brian Prince

The purported head of a rogue antivirus operation has agreed to pay roughly $8.2 million to the Federal Trade Commission to bring a 2-year-old case to a close. According to the FTC, Marc D’Souza and his father, Maurice D’Souza, will pay the money to settle accusations that they profited from a scheme to scam consumers […]

The FBI executed 40 search warrants across the country Jan. 27 as part of an ongoing investigation into distributed denial-of-service attacks launched in “Operation Payback.” The raids came the same day U.K. authoritiesarrested five people believed to be tied to the loosely affiliated group Anonymous, which has taken credit for the attacks. The suspects in […]

Police in the U.K. arrested five males Jan. 27 in connection with several distributed denial-of-service attacks associated with the group -Anonymous.’ The suspects, ages 15-26, were picked up as part of what U.K. police called an ongoing investigation into DDoS attacks launched against several companies last year. According to police, the investigation is being carried […]

A notorious hosting provider reputed as being a safe haven for the Web’s bad actors has been taken offline. According to HostExploit, VolgaHost, a hosting provider based in Russia, was taken offline Jan. 17 after being de-peered by Russian ISP RUNNET.ru, its upstream provider. “VolgaHost is well known to HostExploit,” blogged Jart Armin, an analyst […]

Facebook is rolling out two new features to add an extra layer of security for users. Part one of that layer is a new authentication scheme, dubbed “Social Authentication,” which is meant to keep attackers from hijacking accounts; part two rests with giving users the ability to secure their entire Facebook session via HTTPS. Both […]

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s fan page appears to have been hacked Jan. 25. Though the company has not responded to inquiries about exactly what took place, reports have surfaced that the CEO’s page was compromised and the following message was posted: “Let the hacking begin: If Facebook needs money, instead of going to the banks, […]

Kaspersky Lab has uncovered a rogue antivirus scam tied to ads on ICQ, an instant messaging program. According to Kaspersky, pop-ups for a women’s clothing company called Charlotte Russe that appeared when ICQ was fetching new ads. After ICQ shows a browser window, the browser pops up a message stating Antivirus 8 has found suspicious […]

Spam levels may have risen in the past few weeks, but they still are lower than what users have grown accustomed to seeing, according to a new report from Symantec. In its MessageLabs Intelligence Report (PDF) for January, Symantec revealed spam now accounts for 78.6 percent of all e-mail traffic – the lowest rate since […]

In the movie “Minority Report,” the characters inhabit a world where billboard advertisements call out their names and tailor their pitches to the individuals walking by. A far cry, to be sure, from the targeting advertising seen in the streets, subways and shopping centers of the physical world we know today, but not so much […]

Mozilla is planning to take its own shot at improving user privacy controls online. The company is looking to add a new feature to its Firefox browser that would enable users to opt-out of online behavioral tracking by advertisers. The move follows a December report from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that endorsed the […]

Google has thrown its own hat into the ring in efforts to address privacy concerns related to online behavioral tracking. Roughly 24 hours after Mozilla pitched its idea for a “Do Not Track” mechanism for Firefox, Google announced an extension for the Google Chrome browser that will allow users to permanently opt out of being […]

Hewlett-Packard confirmed Jan. 24 that it will no longer be selling its Neoview data warehousing platform, though it plans to continue supporting the product until 2014. The death of Neoview-which was launched in 2007-is not a surprise for some. Rumors had been circulating for some time that HP was giving up on Neoview. HP and […]