security

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) says an Internet firm claiming it collected only shopper opinions about the products they bought was actually collecting personal data. The firm, Compete, is negotiating a court-approved settlement of the charges. ... So far, the punishment the company will face has not been publicly revealed. Compete used online ads to recruit customers into its "Consumer Input Panel", telling them they can give their opinions and win prizes. To participate, however, consumers needed to install special tracking software on their computers to monitor what websites they visited. ... (view more)

Be careful when using Bing, Microsoft's search engine, says a security expert. According to the expert's report, Bing is more likely than other search engines to offer users links to malicious websites. The report comes from Fraser Howard, a ... computer security researcher with SophosLabs. In the report, Howard suggests that users of Bing are twice as likely as users of Google to find malicious links on their results pages. Bing Bad, Google Less Bad That's a startling number, given that Google has more than four times the market share of Bing. However, it remains unclear how accurate and ... (view more)

Yesterday Mozilla's security chief told users to stop using the latest edition of his company's browser. Michael Coates said the first release of Firefox version 16 contained a serious security flaw. Fortunately, hackers were unable to exploit the ... flaw and Mozilla has since offered a solution to the problem. The problem was particularly serious because Firefox users may have unknowingly upgraded to the new edition. Mozilla uses background updates, so security patches and new editions are downloaded and installed without user control or approval. Most of the time this isn't a problem. In this ... (view more)

According to a new report from Microsoft, Windows 7 and Windows XP users are now facing more malware threats than ever before. Meanwhile, the number of malware programs designed to infect Vista machines is decreasing. Microsoft released these ... findings in its semi-annual Security Intelligence Report, which provides a review of security threats and infections faced by users of Microsoft products during the first half of 2012. Threats to Windows 7, XP On the Increase In the report, Microsoft says the average number of Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) machines infected by malware rose by 23 per ... (view more)

A security company has come up with a way to reduce the effectiveness of website hacking. The plan is to split customer passwords and store them in two or more separate locations. The idea for split passwords comes from security firm RSA, which says ... the new technique aims to frustrate hackers who breach website security in order to acquire user names and passwords. Sometimes that data are stored without any encryption. Even when they are encrypted, hackers are often able to break the encryption, given enough time. Such breaches of security can be particularly dangerous if any of the site's ... (view more)

Several security advisors are warning Skype users to watch out for bogus messages with links that install malicious software. Once installed, a worm virus may pretend to hold the user's files hostage and demand payment for releasing them. Graham ... Cluely of security firm Sophos warns that the scam involves instant messages rather then voice or video chats. Potential victims receive a message containing phrases such as "lol is this your new profile pic?" The message includes a link that takes the user to a Google website featuring their own Skype name. In fact, the link points to "Goo.gl ... (view more)

Over the past week major American banks -- including JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo -- have faced a torrent of cyber attacks. At the moment, no one seems to know who was behind the campaign. Besides JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, Bancorp, ... Citigroup, and Bank of America were also targeted by hackers. It appears the attacks did not capture any customer information, though they did affect online banking services. DDoS Attacks Launched by Advanced Hackers Rodney Joffe, a security expert and senior vice president of the Virginia-based Neustar Inc., says the attacks were carried out by highly ... (view more)

Microsoft has admitted hackers are carrying out targeted attacks to exploit a newly-discovered bug in its popular Internet Explorer web browser. The company is working on a fix, but suggests users consider technical workarounds in the meantime. The ... bug affects all versions of Internet Explorer from version 6 (which shipped with Vista) to version 9 (the current edition). It won't affect Internet Explorer 10, which will first become available with Windows 8 in late October, 2012. Eric Romang, a security researcher, discovered the bug while examining a web server used by hackers. Romang found ... (view more)

After initially indicating that it would not fix an Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) security bug until Windows 8's official October, 2012 release, Microsoft now says it will provide a patch "shortly". The problem is associated with Adobe Flash, software ... that supports multimedia and interactive content for web pages. A recently discovered bug in Flash led to Adobe issuing a security update for the Flash Player. The security update addressed six individual security flaws, all rated 'critical' by Adobe. Any one of them could allow a hacker to crash a computer when trying, for example, to disrupt a ... (view more)

A hacking group says it has acquired personal information associated with 12 million Apple user accounts, and that it got those details by hacking into an FBI agent's computer. So far, the group has published data from one million of those Apple ... accounts. The publication comes from LulzSec , a group whose name is a combination of "security" and a slang term for carrying out online activities for the sake of amusement ("Lulz"). Last summer, the same group leaked documents belonging to Sony Pictures. LulzSec claimed it ceased operations after a 50-day campaign. But later it re-emerged ... (view more)