Security

In a move that could send legal shockwaves through the Internet and e-commerce industries, New York state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has filed suit accusing a major Web marketing firm of distributing spyware and adware to unsuspecting users. Spitzer, who has built a reputation as a fierce watchd...

Tenebril, Inc., a security and privacy solutions company founded in 1998, announced today an award of US$6.5 million in Series A funding and the hiring of industry veteran Irfan Salim as the company's new CEO. The new funding and management change are part of Tenebril's plan to expand its foothold i...

America Online is trying to block the bait in phishing scams, announcing today that it will seek to identify bogus sites and prevent its users from gaining access to them. AOL will work with Cyota, an anti-fraud and security company, to implement the plan, which will operate 24 hours per day. Phishi...

In sharp contrast to the harmless pranks that will be played on this April Fools' Day, deceptive phishing schemes are no laughing matter. To strike a blow against criminals who prey on Internet users, Microsoft yesterday filed 117 lawsuits in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washi...

When a company or even a not-for-profit organization collects, uses and/or deals with personal information, it might be legally required to immediately notify individuals whose information it is handling if there is a security breach relating to that information. Apart from specific local laws that ...

Users of Yahoo's free instant messaging service have been targeted by a phishing attack, one of the first widespread attempts to use the messaging medium to pilfer personal information. Targets of the scam are sent a link that, when clicked, takes users to what appears to be a Yahoo site that asks f...

Phishing is one of the fastest-growing security threats on the Internet, according to the latest Internet Security Threat Report from security vendor Symantec, with the number of phishing incidents rising to 33 million per week. "Attackers are launching increasingly sophisticated attacks in an effor...

Malicious code writers have apparently pounced on a known security vulnerability in MSN Messenger, unleashing a rash of new viruses aimed at Microsoft's instant messenger platform. The outbreak of viruses comes about three weeks after a vulnerability in the platform was published online. That brough...

E-commerce continues to grow dramatically in spite of security threats, recent research indicates. E-commerce dollar volume in 2004 rose 88 percent and transaction volume grew by 39 percent over the previous year, according to VeriSign's latest Internet Security Intelligence Briefing. The VeriSign r...

Another strain of the MyDoom worm is on the loose and is spreading quickly today, according to antivirus firm Sophos. The new MyDoom variant emerged yesterday and can use search engines Google, Yahoo, Lycos and AltaVista to try to gather e-mail addresses to send itself to. The original version of th...

EBay, Microsoft, PayPal and Visa are hooking up to catch some phishing fraudsters. The high-tech heavyweights yesterday became the first participants in a new anti-phishing aggregation service dubbed the Phish Report Network and organized by WholeSecurity, an Austin, Texas-based company that screens...

What do New York and Nigeria have in common? Something far more serious than beginning with the letter "n." Both of these regions have earned the dubious distinction of ranking among the riskiest places in the world for e-commerce, according to a survey by CyberSource Corporation. The Big Apple was ...

Continuing a trend it began almost two years ago, Microsoft said it has bought a privately held antivirus firm to help it beef up its arsenal of information security tools, this time focusing squarely on the enterprise. Microsoft said it would acquire East Northport, New York-based Sybari Software, ...

It's anything but smooth sailing for COAST these days. Members of the Consortium of Anti-Spyware Technology Vendors are dropping like flies. Analysts said a factor in the controversy could be Microsoft's entrance into the multi-million-dollar market. On Friday, Computer Associates International, whi...

A new company in the anti-phishing space is offering a free program that acts much like a firewall for Web sites to protect computer users from online fraud attacks. FraudEliminator, a security software startup, is offering the first product to provide comprehensive protection to home Internet users...