It wasn’t a good week to be an Alaskan vice-presidential candidate, an online publication or even a multinational science project — as all were compromised by hackers this week.
The Red Hat-supported Fedora Project has started issuing updates to its Linux distribution again, after a hiatus of several weeks caused by a hacker break-in. US-based Red Hat, which in Australia has customers such as the National Australia Bank, warned in mid-August that hackers had broken into some of its servers that were involved with both its Red Hat Linux Enterprise offering and the Fedora Project.
A few weeks ago, when I wrote that, “forced to choose, the average FOSS-based business is going to choose business interests over FOSS [free and open source software] every time,” many people, including Mathew Aslett and Matt Assay, politely accused me of being too cynical. Unhappily, you only have to look at the relations between Red Hat and Fedora, the distribution Red Hat sponsors, during the recent security crisis for evidence that I might be all too accurate.
Often the greatest tech crimes in history have little more reason behind them than “because it was there.” More often than not, a hacker sees an open window—a hole in system’s security, a backdoor, etc.—and climbs on through. And they don’t do it for any real worldly gain, but merely to prove that they can.
McAfee Inc. has announced McAfee Artemis Technology that uses a new Internet-based service hosted by McAfee Avert Labs to provide active protection on the fly when a computer gets hit by malicious computer code. Artemis leverages behavioral technology to examine a piece of malware that isn’t explicitly protected.
Facebook and other Web sites such as MySpace, Bebo and Google are creating technology platforms that let third-party developers build applications to run on those sites. The concept has opened the door to innovation, but also prompted worries over how those applications could be used for spam or to steal personal data.
Users who downloaded the search giant’s Chrome browser yesterday were asked to give Google a “perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly, perform, publicly display and distribute” any information they typed into a website.
The InPrivate Browsing feature in Microsoft’s latest browser is designed to delete a user’s browsing history and other personal data that is gathered and stored during regular browsing sessions. The feature is commonly referred to as ‘porn mode’ for its ability to hide which websites have been visited from nosy spouses or employers.
Email spam got you down? Is your first name Aaron? A study by Cambridge University security expert Richard Clayton shows that the first letter of your email address has a lot to do with the amount of spam you receive.
A staggering 88 percent of IT administrators admitted they would take corporate secrets, if they were suddenly made redundant. The target information included CEO passwords, customer databases, research and development plans, financial reports, M&A plans and the company’s list of privileged passwords.