Harvard Site Hacked, Alleged Content Hits BitTorrent
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A file described as the database for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Web site shows up for sharing.
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Personal information on more than 5,700 current and former faculty members at the University of Virginia may have been stolen by hackers who accessed the data multiple times over a period of almost two years.
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TORONTO - One of the internet&#39;s most popular file-sharing websites has suddenly closed up shop, likely a high profile victim of the lawsuits launched last week against those operating servers using the BitTorrent network.
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A Chilean gay rights group claims its Web site was hacked by a Chilean skinhead group.
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A surprisingly large number of people who share music and other files on P2P systems are inadvertently exposing bank account and similar personal information on their computers, according to a study by Dartmouth University's Tuck School of Business.
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It looks like TorrentSpy's decision to ban US users from its site may have been done in response to possible court action anyway, as it has been ordered to hand over information stored in its servers' RAM.
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A new device capable of detecting and throttling encrypted BitTorrent traffic hits the shelves. The game of cat and mouse between ISPs and BitTorrent users continues. In Monkey Bites.
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A hacker has infiltrated a University of California, Los Angeles database containing the personal information on 800,000 people, the school said on Tuesday, in one of the worst computer breaches ever at a U.S. university.
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A security company has identified a Trojan horse program that replaces Google text advertisements on Web pages with ads from another source, depriving Google of revenue and potentially causing problems for end users.Google may be powerless to stop the trick since it involves the modification of an internal PC file, called the hosts file, that is used to match domain names of Web sites with IP (Internet protocol) addresses, said Romanian security company BitDefender.When a person visits a Web site, the browser checks the hosts file to see if it has an IP address for a particular domain name. If the hosts file is corrupted or hijacked, the browser can be directed to fetch a different Web page than the one the user intended to.Modifying the hosts file can be done for legitimate reasons. For example, PC users can change the hosts to block banner ads served from known ad networks. When a Web page tries to contact an ad server, the request is diverted by the hosts file and no ad appears.BitDefender said in an advisory this particular malware directs a browser to download advertisements from a different server than Google&#39;s ad server.BitDefender named the malware Trojan.Qhost.WU and said it is not spreading fast and poses a &quot;medium&quot; risk of damage. It did not say how the Trojan is being circulated, and company representatives did not return a call for comment.Besides costing Google ad revenue, there is a danger that those replacement advertisements could contain links to sites with malicious software, BitDefender said. Web site owners who buy ads through Google, as well as Google itself, can lose out on both Web traffic and revenue if people are diverted from its ads.There is not much that Google can do for those who download the malware. However, security products such as BitDefender&#39;s can detect and remove it.Without commenting on the Trojan specifically, Google said it removes Web sites from its search index that contain malware.&quot;We have canceled customer accounts that display ads re-directing users to malicious sites or that advertise a product violating our software principles,&quot; the company said in a statement.
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Three of the 13 computers used to manage global internet traffic are hacked overnight. It's one of the biggest attacks since 2002. By the Associated Press.
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A Republican Party Web site has been hacked, and for some time it has been spreading a variation of the long-running Storm Trojan horse to vulnerable visitors, a security researcher said Friday.
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A non-campus computer and server that were hooked to the campus network without proper security precautions have been linked to a University of California, Berkeley hacker
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(InfoWorld) - If hijacked sites and hosting companies that fail to police malware distribution sources represent two of the most serious threats to Internet security, there may be hope for improvement, according to researchers working with Harvard Law School's StopBadware.org. After publishing a list of rogue Web site hosting companies and launching a campaign to label every malicious site they can find on the Internet, an effort that has filtered out over 600,000 nefarious applications thus far, the StopBadware team says that people are responding.Â  The project currently counts less than 250,000 Web sites that it classifies as distributors of programs that qualify as badware -- any application that either tries to hide itself or any of its intentions, based on the parameters of the effort. StopBadware also announced that Internet mainstays Paypal and VeriSign have joined its influential cast of sponsors, which includes Google. By inserting warnings into Google's search results that steer end-users away from malware and adware sources, while communicating with those responsible for creating or handing out the suspicious programs, progress is being made, according to StopBadware's lead researchers. "The interstitials delivered with Google search results are working, and we've been able to communicate with a lot of Webmasters. It's having a neighborhood effect," said Prof. John Palfrey, executive director of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society. "We're reaching out to hosting companies and Webmasters and filtering the complaints where it seems useful, and we've seen many people change their behavior." In addition to all the people who have no idea that their sites are being used to pass out malicious programs and those who misunderstand the nature of the applications they're distributing, StopBadware researchers say that even those who create many of the programs are engaging in the give and take. For those who can be reached, the debate over whether or not a particular program qualifies as badware typically can be resolved, with very few of those who agree to modify their applications going on to repeat their behavior, said Jason Callina, one of the StopBadware researchers. "We're seeing a low recurrence of people coming back on the lists once we've gone through the testing and communications process. People are actually helping each other move off the lists," Callina said. "When there's ever any serious disagreement, it's always an argument of our definition of spyware versus theirs." Most Webmasters complain about the interstitials on Google -- which they are notified of 24 hours in advance and given the opportunity to appeal. But the immediate drop in search-driven traffic that the warnings produce quickly convinces people to either take any questionable applications offline or kill their sites altogether, Callina said. Meanwhile, StopBadware's list of hosting companies responsible for supporting the largest number of malware sites resulted in at least one leading culprit -- iPower Technologies --Â  changing its ways, while two others have disappeared completely. Others have also begun to modify their behavior, Palfrey said. "The best measure of our success is when any of these companies change their business process and we're seeing them adjusting," said Palfrey. "At the same time, we're trying to enable [end users] to make better choices with their using habits." So many of the people who end up on StopBadware's list need help understanding what it is that they're doing wrong that the team feels its ability to mete out advice is being overwhelmed, he said. At the same time, StopBadware admits that sophisticated hackers are still advancing their efforts at an alarming pace and the organization can't keep up with the ever-growing volume of online malware programs. In addition to tracking down the programs, StopBadware is also charting regional trends, and the researchers contend that a growing number of suspicious applications are originating in China. The level of interaction between malware authors in the region and their Western counterparts is also becoming more prevalent, with a fair share of distribution still emanating from former Soviet-bloc regions as well, the team said. The key for legitimate businesses to steer clear of the entire problem is to be careful with the companies they partner with, said Palfrey, who served as host of an Anti-Spyware Coalition conference held at Harvard in June. The security consortium is backed by influential industry players including AOL, Dell, Google, McAfee, Microsoft, and Yahoo. "The biggest concern for legitimate businesses at this point is related primarily to software bundling," said Palfrey. "There's often a complicated chain between the original purveyor of a program and the consumer, so companies need to be explicit about what they would qualify for badware-type behavior themselves and hold their partners to that."
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A video download site that had been exposed as a front for the MPAA to catch those who download copyrighted content, as well as those who may have already downloaded it, has been taken offline.
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And alternatives to Donkeys Letters eDonkey got its, er, ass kicked in the New York courts last week. And the RIAA owns its front page. And any visitor's IP addresses, it reckons. So, what to do, for the determined downloader?â¦
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By Todd R. Brown  SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO -- Talk about working blue: A local venture capital firm recently fell prey to a hacker who took over the company's Web site and directed viewers to several porn sites instead.
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Several London-based servers of an alternative media network have been seized by the FBI in an operation, rumoured to be related to recent requests to remove photos posted on a web site.