Cybercrime

Internet auction fraud accounts for close to half of all the complaints made to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, according to a report released Friday. Of the 207,492 complaint submissions made to the Internet Crime Complaint Center in 2006, Internet auction fraud accounted for 45 percent,...

Google plans to provide Web advertisers with more data and tools to combat click fraud, a damaging practice that costs advertisers an estimated $16 billion a year. The new tools are part of an effort to crack down on click fraud and dull its impact on the otherwise highly profitable pay per click on...

Last year, the average click fraud rate of pay-per-click advertisements appearing on search engine content networks rose to 19.2 percent for the last quarter of 2006, the highest yet, according to Tom Cuthbert, CEO of Click Forensics. Click fraud occurs when online advertisers pay search engine comp...

Click fraud is a growing problem for online advertisers who rely on paid search services. Marketing experts are urging e-commerce vendors have to take proactive steps to combat it. Online advertisers pay the search engine company hosting their ad a set amount of money each time a computer user click...

Count Jonathan Bingham among those who weren't all that surprised by the reputed breach of security that may have resulted in Cisco's guarded Internet Operating System source code being pilfered and posted on the Web. It's not that Bingham, a former Forrester Research analyst who is now president of...

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has revealed it has been working with attorneys general in 29 states to enforce existing fraud laws against auction scammers. Known as "Operation Bidder Beware," the effort already has resulted in 57 criminal and civil actions. "Having state and federal agencies co...

On paper, Symantec appears to be one of the hottest tech companies around. Propelled in part by users' need to defend against a rash of destructive and well-publicized computer worms like Code Red, Nimda and SirCam, its stock price has jumped 70 percent in the past year. Nonetheless, leading industr...

The bad news is no secret, but it bears repeating: If you have bought anything online in the past several years, your personal information, including your home address and credit card number, is probably accessible via the Internet -- and available to people with less-than-noble intentions. Fortunat...

Recognizing that more consumers than ever would take to the Internet for holiday shopping this year, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission warned consumers to be cautious. Their first piece of advice: Deal with only those companies that you know and trust. But because the Web is a blind medium, sometime...

Made official last month by President Bush, the Department of Homeland Security consolidates 22 agencies, employing a total of 170,000 federal employees, under a single virtual roof. The question on many IT executives' minds is: What can my company gain from this reorganization? The department's 200...

In the wake of massive denial-of-service attacks on the Internet's DNS root servers, the likelihood of an attack that could crash the Internet -- and bring e-commerce to a screeching halt -- seems far greater than it once did. Every 24 hours of Internet downtime theoretically could mean more than $1...

Software development is a much different animal than it was 20 years ago. As program size has increased, so has the number of security flaws. In the latest disclosure by a major vendor, Microsoft announced a flaw in the SmartHTML Interpreter contained in Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions that co...

Allocating precious budget dollars is always a challenge in a down economy, and with security threats seeming to loom at every turn, CIOs are struggling mightily to gauge risks and decide how to face them. While the temptation may be to throw money at perceived security problems, decision makers ins...

Hotels.com's offices were evacuated and its stock suffered a sharp drop after a white powdery substance was discovered in the company's mailroom. Local authorities in McAllen, Texas, ordered the evacuation of the Hotels.com processing center -- where about 100 people process reservations made thr...

For Web travelers seeking to lighten their load of usernames and passwords, help has generally been slow to arrive. Some relief for the forgetful has come in the form of functions -- installed on popular operating systems -- that serve to ease the mental burden of those surfing from a single comp...