Web Site 'Outs' Killers, Panic!
556731
By Jason Bracelin  What does God have against Las Vegas?  Well, apparently, dude's got a problem with both the Killers and Panic! At the Disco, two of the city's biggest bands.
248717
MacCentral - A handful of Web sites, including the site for the popular open source bulletin board project phpBB, have been compromised this week by a group apparently trying to make a political point.
211846
The Web is scarier than most people realize, according to research published recently by Google.The search engine giant trained its Web crawling software on billions of Web addresses over the past year looking for malicious pages that tried to attack their visitors. They found more than 3 million of them, meaning that about one in 1,000 Web pages is malicious, according to Neils Provos, a senior staff software engineer with Google.These Web-based attacks, called &quot;drive-by downloads&quot; by security experts, have become much more common in recent years as firewalls and better security practices by Microsoft have made it harder for worms and viruses to directly attack computers.In the past year the Web sites of Al Gore&#39;s An Inconvenient Truth movie and the Miami Dolphins were hacked, and the MySpace profile of Alicia Keys was used to attack visitors.Criminals are getting better at this kind of work. They have built very successful automated tools that poke and prod Web sites, looking for programming errors and then exploit these flaws to install the drive-by download software. Often this code opens an invisible iFrame page on the victim&#39;s browser that redirects it to a malicious Web server. That server then tries to install code on the victim&#39;s PC. &quot;The bad guys are getting exceptionally good at automating those attacks,&quot; said Roger Thompson, chief research officer with security vendor Grisoft.In response, Google has stepped up its game. One of the reasons it has been scouring the Web for malicious pages is so that it can identify drive-by-download sites and warn Google searchers before they visit them. Nowadays about 1.3 percent of all Google search queries list malicious results somewhere on the first few pages.Some of the data surprised Provos.&quot;When we started going into this, I had the firm intuition that if you go to the sleazier parts of the Web, you are in more danger,&quot; he said.It turns out the Web&#39;s nice neighborhoods aren&#39;t necessarily safer than its red-light districts.&quot;We looked into this and indeed we found that if you ended up going to adult-oriented pages, your risk of being exposed [to malicious software] was slightly higher,&quot; he said. But &quot;there really wasn&#39;t a huge difference.&quot;&quot;Staying away from the disreputable part of the Internet really isn&#39;t good enough,&quot; he noted.Another interesting finding: China was far and away the greatest source of malicious Web sites. According to Google&#39;s research, 67 percent of all malware distribution sites are hosted in China. The second-worst offender? The U.S., at 15 percent, followed by Russia (4 percent), Malaysia (2.2 percent), and Korea (2 percent).It costs next to nothing to register a Web domain in China and service providers are often slow to shut down malicious pages, said Thompson. &quot;They&#39;re the Kleenex Web sites,&quot; he said. Criminals &quot;know they&#39;re going to be shut down, and they don&#39;t care.&quot;Malicious site operators in China fall into two broad categories, Thompson said: Fraudsters looking to steal your banking password, and teenagers who want to steal your World of Warcraft character.So how to stop this growing pestilence?Google&#39;s Provos has this advice for Web surfers: Turn automatic updates on. &quot;You should always run your software as updated as possible and install some kind of antivirus technology,&quot; he said.But he also thinks that Webmasters will have to get smarter about building secure Web sites. &quot;I think it will take concentrated efforts on all parts,&quot; for the problem to go away, he said.
601188
Dark clouds are gathering over the local blogosphere. First there were "splog" attacks, pieces of spam left in the comments area of local blogs. That was kids' stuff. Now it appears that at least two blogs in the western suburbs have become victims of a new, scarier menace: blogjacking.
420300
Introducing The 404s, a contest to find the least informative military websites. Strike a blow for open government; win prizes. In Danger Room.
585276
Before heading over to the Web 2.0 conference at the Palace Hotel in SF this morning, I couldn't resist doing some more digging into alternate user interfaces for news reading based on the NY Times keywords.  One thing I learned the hard way is that when you access the Times site from a script (not through a browser) if you try to read an article that's too old (not sure what the time limit is) it tries to redirect you to a login page (which is pretty pointless considering that there's no human being around to log in). I hit this problem yesterday, and then hit it again this morning, but couldn't remember what the problem was. So by writing it up this time I hope to remember.  No doubt some debunked hack journalist posing as a tech industry mogul will slander me for this, but the asshat asshole has no idea how blogging works, and who the fuck cares what he thinks anyway. "cheesecake"
44073
Also: UN warning on e-waste 'mountain.' Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
368078
"And there I stood: alone in the dark, unknown terrors approaching, armed only with a bucket of water."  "Which is, curiously enough, almost exactly the position that Windows users find themselves in today: alone in the dark, unknown terrors approaching, but in their case, having a bucket of water would be an improvement."  "MS04-028 is, perhaps, the epitome of bad technical writing - the literary equivalent of spaghetti code. I've read through it far too many times, and I still understand far too little."  And who is at fault here?  You or Microsoft?  Microsoft has for years demonstrated that they hate their customers.  Yet its people like Tom Liston that keep coming back for more abuse.  T ...
619634
By John McBride, The Charlotte Observer, N.C.  Sep. 10--You go to Google and get your search results -- then what?   How do you know whether the sites Google returns can be trusted? You can't. It's you against the world.
238295
Also: Searching passengers' faces for subtle cues to terror. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
44261
An obscure government website that became an Internet conflagration
110407
A controversial website, www.live-shot.com, already allows Internet users to fire a .22 caliber rifle at targets on a Texas ranch from afar.
402521
Introducing The 404s, Wired's contest to find the least-informative sites on the military web. Strike a blow for open government (and win prizes).  In Danger Room.
450065
Nothing to Fear... ? &gt;&gt; Advertisement &lt;&lt;  ALERT: "How A Hacker Launches A Blind SQL Injection Attack Step-by-Step"!" - White Paper  Blind SQL Injection can deliver total control of your server to a hacker giving them the ability to read, write and manipulate all data stored in your backend systems! Download this *FREE* white paper from SPI Dynamics for a complete guide to protection! https://download.spidynamics.com/1/ad/bsq.asp?Campaign_ID=701600000004c29
319998
Blog: IM directs victims to malicious Web site where they are duped into typing in their password, it then sends itself to the victims' contacts.
288540
Also: Dating faux-pas: Stealing other people's profiles. See what people are saying on News.com Extra.
44270
Tycho: The recently conducted Xfire chat has now been collated into this easy to digest transcript. In case you wanted to digest it. In addition, the latest page of our insane Prey project has now gone online. Just click the link on the left, for "We Have Visitors."  Also! Your mom is trying to get a hold of you. You should give her a call.(CW)TB