Fahmida Y. Rashid

Chinese hackers may have had commercial, not political, motivation for the large DDoS attacks that brought WordPress.com to its knees last week. WordPress.com was hit by a series of distributed denial of service attacks on March 4, less than a day after recovering from a massive attack on March 3, the company said. Parent company […]

With so many reports of Android and iPhone malware, it was only a matter of time before a BlackBerry variant emerged. A variant of the Zeus banking Trojan targeting BlackBerry smartphones was detected by security researchers at Trend Micro. With more users using their phones to get up-to-date alerts on their bank account balances, to […]

The title really says it all. Robert Soloway, the man better known as the “Spam King,” was released Feb. 26 from the Federal Correctional Institution in Oregon. The man who admitted to sending more than 10 trillion spam messages in his career wil now have probation officers monitoring every e-mail message he sends for the […]

Microsoft will not be updating Internet Explorer before the Pwn2Own hacking contest, despite the fact that elite hackers will be gunning for the Web browser. Microsoft made the announcement on March 4 as security researchers are getting ready for Pwn2Own, a contest that pits hackers against the latest versions of the four major browsers and […]

Libya lost Internet connectivity again on March 3, according to multiple traffic monitors. Search queries to Google and YouTube traffic both flat-lined starting about 11 a.m. Eastern time, or 7 p.m. Libya time on March 3, and this has continued since, according to the Google Transparency Report. Interestingly, there had been a dramatic increase in […]

Trojan-based attacks continue to be the biggest malware threat in February, but PDF exploits aren’t far behind, according to several security reports. About 1 in 290 e-mails in February were malicious, making the month one of the most prolific periods for the threats, according to Symantec’s February 2011 MessageLabs Intelligence Report. The global ratio of […]

Congress passed an interim law slashing $20 million from cyber-security funding while continuing the debate on other budget cuts. The short-term continuing resolution, signed into law March 2, keeps the government operating till March 18 and buys the House of Representatives and the Senate time to negotiate other cuts for the rest of fiscal 2011, […]

WordPress.com, a popular blogging platform, was hit by a large DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack that affected connectivity to a number of its blogs. The attack appeared to have begun just before 11 a.m. EST on March 3 and lasted for about two hours, according to a status page on parent company Automattic’s site. WordPress.com is […]

Hackers and other computer experts willing to collaborate with the Department of Homeland Security to bolster the nation’s cyber-defense are unable to do so because of red tape, according to the former head of the department. Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff, two former secretaries of Homeland Security, joined current DHS boss Janet Napolitano to discuss […]

Other World Computing has put together “do-it-yourself” kits to upgrade memory and storage for Apple’s new MacBook Pro computers. Kits are available for the new MacBook Pro 13-inch, 15-inch and 17-inch models, Other World Computing said Mar. 1. There are kits to upgrade memory, to swap in higher capacity solid-state drives and to install higher-speed […]

Despite the convenience of a cloud-based password management service, a security researcher warned that putting passwords in the cloud may not be the best idea after all. After the Gawker breach revealed the number of people reusing passwords across multiple sites, there was renewed interest in using password management applications such as KeePass and LastPass. […]

There were 205.3 million domain addresses by the end of 2010, 6.3 percent more than the end of 2009, according to the latest numbers from Verisign. A little over half of the registered domains have a .com or .net extension, Verisign said. That number is expected to continue its upward swing. In a research note […]