Fahmida Y. Rashid

Almost immediately after federal prosecutors shut down Megaupload.com on charges of violating piracy laws, Twitter and online forums exploded with chatter about revenge and retaliation. Federal prosecutorsshut down file-sharing service Megaupload.com on Jan. 19 for distributing illegal content in one of the largest online piracy crackdowns in Internet history and arrested four individuals. Hours later, […]

After law enforcement authorities shut down Megaupload, a popular file sharing service, for violating copyright laws, Internet users took to Twitter and online forums in protest, calling it a form of censorship. For many users, the shutdown had nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with the fact that their backups and data […]

The controversial Stop Online Piracy and Protect IP acts have been temporarily shelved as congressional lawmakers figure out their next move. The Senate will postpone the vote on PIPA that was originally scheduled for Jan. 24, House Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Jan. 20. He made the decision after weeks of intense lobbying by […]

McAfee has fixed issues in its Total Protection service that allowed attackers to take over computers to send out spam. A bug in McAfee’s hosted anti-malware service was being exploited by spammers to turn computers into a spam proxy to send out large volumes of spam, David Marcus, director of security research at McAfee Labs, […]

Just a day after a 24-hour blackout of popular Websites such as Wikipedia,Reddit and BoingBoing, which were protesting a pair of controversial anti-piracy bills making their way through Congress, federal law enforcement stepped in and shut down one of the world’s largest file-sharing sites. The 72-page indictment, unsealed Jan. 19, accuses seven individuals and two […]

Contrary to conventional wisdom, a significant number of applications running on enterprise networks do not pass through port 80, so securing just that port does not protect the network, according to a recent report. Application traffic analyzed by Palo Alto Networks in its semiannual Application Usage and Risk Report found that 35 percent of the […]

Under a new Alcatel-Lucent and Arbor Networks partnership, service providers would be able to offer customers cloud-based defenses against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Arbor Networks’ Threat Management System (TMS) software has been integrated into blades installed inside Alcatel-Lucent’s 7750 router, the companies said Jan. 18. Each blade can handle 5G bps of traffic […]

The National Security Agency has publicly released SE Android, a secure version of Google’s mobile operating system. A security-enhanced version of Android, SE Android would enforce stricter access-control policies and better sandboxing than what is currently available in the most up-to-date version of Google Android. The NSA announced the project at the Linux Security Summit […]

The voluntary Internet blackout, in which approximately 7,000 sites, including online encyclopedia Wikipedia, made their sites inaccessible to protest Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act generated a lot of discussion online and convinced several lawmakers to reconsider their support for the controversial bills. To protest the bills, Wikipedia announced a 24-hour long site […]

Scammers are expected to take advantage of the online dissent protesting the draconian nature of the proposed anti-piracy bills currently in Congress to promote their own malicious agenda, according to ESET.A number of Websites, large and small, went dark for 24 hours on Jan. 18, including the English version of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, quirky […]

Security researchers have publicly unmasked five people they believe are behind Koobface, a botnet that spreads on social-networking sites and directs users to Websites selling fake antivirus and other scams. Facebook has been fighting the malware for the past year and successfully took one of the command-and-control servers controlling the botnet offline last March, the […]

Symantec has admitted that unknown perpetrators had breached its servers and stolen source code to a number of its security products despite previous claims to the contrary. Earlier this month, a group called Lords of Dharmaraja claimed to have broken into military intelligence servers belonging to the Indian government and obtained source code to Symantec […]