Security News

SEOUL (AFP) - South Korean authorities on Wednesday halved the daily limit on text messages sent out by mobile phones as part of a campaign against spam, officials said.

One of the most notorious U.S.-based spammers was sentenced to more than four years in jail on Monday for a scheme that used spam to manipulate stock prices in order to make a profit.

BOULDER, Colo. - A leading climate change scientist said hackers breaking into a university's computer server and then posting documents online show the nasty politics of global warming.

DETROIT - A federal judge has sentenced a suburban Detroit man described as one of the world's most prolific senders of spam e-mail to more than four years in prison for his role in a 2005 stock fraud scheme that netted him $2.7 million.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A Hong Kong resident and three other men, including the self-proclaimed "Godfather of Spam," were sentenced to prison on Monday for their roles in an email stock fraud scheme, the Justice Department said.

BOSTON (Reuters) - Hackers have built a virus that attacks Apple Inc's iPhone by secretly taking control of the devices via their Internet connections, security experts said.

Just two weeks after Apple iPhone users in Australia reported jailbroken iPhones came under siege by attackers, a new version of the iPhone worm is posing a threat. Symantec reports the new worm targets jailbroken iPhones running SSH that are still using the default password. The worm can reportedly steal data stored on the iPhone as well as connect back to the attacker, giving them control of the phone.

Another week, another worm hitting jailbroken iPhones. As with the previous exploits, which Rickrolled your phone’s wallpaper and stole your data, this nasty piece of work burrows its way into your jailbroken device if you haven’t changed the password for the iPhone’s root account—you have changed your root password, right? Right?

A new Facebook worm appeared over the weekend, pairing malware with a sexy come-on. NSFW warning: racy image inside.

A hacker has posted attack code that could be used to break into a PC running older versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser.

A Seattle computer security consultant says he's developed a new way to exploit a recently disclosed bug in the SSL protocol, used to secure communications on the Internet. The attack, while difficult to execute, could give attackers a very powerful phishing attack.

LONDON - A couple suspected of helping spread some of the Internet's most aggressive computer viruses has been arrested in the English city of Manchester, police said Wednesday.

LONDON (Reuters) - Detectives have made the first arrests in Europe to tackle a "trojan" computer virus which is believed to have infected tens of thousands of computers across the world, London police said on Wednesday.

British police said Wednesday they've made the first arrests in Europe of two people for using Zeus, a sophisticated malicious software program that can scoop up any sensitive information on a PC.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - Security weaknesses uncovered in Los Alamos National Laboratory's classified computer network could increase the risk of a breach of classified information, the U.S. Government Accountability Office said in a new report.

NEW YORK - Shares of Fortinet Inc. priced higher than expected at $12.50 each ahead of the computer security company's planned initial public offering Wednesday.

It also makes computer security problems. Research out this week shows how companies may be letting tech security slip as they rush to do more tasks online, under greater budget pressures.

NEW YORK - Fortinet Inc. plans to go public Wednesday in an initial public offering, giving investors a chance to tap a network security provider with sales expected to grow.

Current laws addressing cyber crime aren't adequate to address growing attacks on the government and businesses, a representative of U.S. President Barack Obama's administration said Tuesday.

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (AFP) - Laws regulating cybercrimes must target individuals and not society as a whole, an IT specialist told an Internet governance forum at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on Tuesday.

WASHINGTON - Hackers are increasingly targeting law firms and public relations companies with a sophisticated e-mail scheme that breaks into their computer networks to steal sensitive data, often linked to large corporate clients doing business overseas.

U.K. police are hailing the sentencing of four people who used a sophisticated Trojan horse program to siphon money out of online bank accounts and send it to Eastern European countries and Russia.

Cyber-criminals have started preying on Verizon Wireless customers, sending out spam e-mail messages that say their accounts are over the limit and offering them a "balance checker" program to review their payments.

Internet security experts say that misconfigured DSL and cable modems are worsening a well-known problem with the Internet's DNS (domain name system), making it easier for hackers to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against their victims.

Windows 7 escaped the monthly patching process earlier this week, but it didn't escape the notice of hackers. What some security researchers are calling the first zero-day exploit in Windows 7 has been identified and Microsoft is investigating the issue.

A hacker eager to reconnect modded Xbox 360s banned by Microsoft in recent days may be on the verge of releasing a workaround. According to 360Mods (by way of DailyTech), user 'c4eva' has shifted gears from developing Lite-on and Hitachi optical drive mods to creating a firmware rev that would allow modded Xbox 360s to bypass Microsoft's online security tests.

Late last week, an Australian hacker dubbed ikee deployed the Rickrolling worm– a harmless and humorous worm that installs a picture of 80’s one hit wonder Rick Astley to affected users’ home screens.

Another piece of dangerous code that attacks iPhones has been found, although it puts at risk only a very small subset of the smartphone's users.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Alleged computer hackers from Estonia, Russia and Moldova have been indicted in a scheme that netted nine million dollars from cash dispensers, the US Justice Department said on Tuesday.