web sites

In taking advantage of a security loophole, hackers have hijacked as many as four million website pages over the past week. It's thought to be the biggest attack of its type, ever. The attacks have been dubbed LizaMoon, named after the first ... destination to which visitors of hijacked sites were redirected. The hijack campaign has proven to be incredibly successful: on the first day, security firm Websense estimated 28,000 web sites were affected, but within three days that figure had risen to 500,000. Two days later and the number of affected pages were estimated to be as high as three or four ... (view more)

Microsoft has unveiled a beta version of their latest software offering called 'WebMatrix'. The free tool is intended to simplify application-based development on Microsoft's ASP.Net web platform. Among its many features, "the (WebMatrix) tool is ... free, provides core coding and database support, integrates with an open source web application gallery and includes support to easily publish and deploy sites and applications to web-hosting providers" according to a recent blog post written by Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president in the Microsoft Developer Division. (Source: computerworld.com ) ... (view more)

Just in time for the announcement that the National Security Agency (NSA) will be pervasively monitoring private networks comes news that cyber attacks attributed to North Korea paralyzed major South Korean and U.S. government web sites. Eleven ... South Korean organizations, including the presidential Blue House, the Defense Ministry, the National Assembly, Shinhan Bank, Korea Exchange Bank and top Internet portal Naver, and coincidentally, eleven U.S. sites including the U.S. Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department, went down or experienced ... (view more)

I'd hate to be a web writer, editor, or site owner while living in China. The country recently shut down over a thousand web sites it claimed were illicit and inappropriate, and critics are already speculating that those pages targeted might have ... displayed more than just nudies. At first, the site closures seem to be limited to those violating China's laws of "social morality," laws meant to protect the delicate "physical and mental health of youths." Images on sites like tiexue.com and vodone.com included a number of under-dressed women. However, at the same time official outlet People's ... (view more)

In the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, a new breed of hacker-investigators monitoring how traffic is routed through countries where web sites are blocked and why it is happening are reportedly conducting digital espionage --- turning their ... attention to a new weapon of international warfare: cyber attacks. "Hacktivists," led by Ronald J. Deibert, director of Citizen Lab, referred to as the "NSA of operations," set out to help residents in countries that censor online content, but have ended up tracking wars. Citizen Lab researchers created a software tool called Psiphon that helps ... (view more)

Have you ever come across an ad for a software program that looks especially interesting? For example: an ad might claim that the program has won awards and is the absolute best at doing a particular maintenance task on your computer. The truth is ... that some ads can be very compelling, but often mislead users into downloading unscrupulous software. So how do you know if the claims true? Is the software legitimate? Is the software malware? How can experienced users decide -- and what about inexperience users? Well, I am going to tell you how I go about finding the answers. It is not difficult ... (view more)

Synopsis: Are you a download-a-holic? Do you suffer from slower than average download speeds? Do you often get disconnected in the middle of a download? Do you use Internet Explorer and wish there was a way you could resume a broken download (and ... avoid having to start from the beginning)? Do you have trouble remembering where your last downloaded file was saved to? If you answered 'Yes' to any of these questions, then you'll definitely want to find out why PC Magazine bestowed the Editors' Choice Award to Conceiva DownloadStudio for best Internet Download Manager -- but only if you read ... (view more)

Infopackets.com isn't the only web server under attack from hackers as of late . " Several major web sites, including Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, were inaccessible at times early [Tuesday (06/15/2004), due to an online attack]. The problem began ... about 9 a.m. Eastern and lasted less than two hours, said Jeff Young, a spokesperson for Akamai Technologies Inc., whose network of servers mirror some of the Web's top destinations to improve their performance. " (1) Akamai Technologies later confirmed that its network and servers came under 'a sophisticated, large-scale attack' as a ... (view more)

I am in aw e. Yesterday, I asked Infopackets Readers to visit freetechmail.org and submit comments about this newsletter. There were a number of entries, but one comment in particular caught my eye (especially the last line). Douwe F. from Kuala ... Lumpur, Malaysia writes: " [What I really like about] The Infopackets Gazette [are the newsletter topics, which are] explained in clear language. Although I am an IT professional, I enjoy reading all the various articles [written by Dennis, and I especially enjoy the] different perspective on issues [which are presented to readers]. I find this ... (view more)

This issue of the Gazette is a continuation of yesterday's article, regarding Parental Control Software which is used to block "bad" web sites (pornography, gambling, bad language, nudity, sex, and violence). You know -- all that kind of bad stuff ... we normally see on day-time TV talk shows. Anyway, I decided to test out a highly recommended web-filtering program, called "We-Blocker". The results of that test were mixed . We-Blocker was able to block only a *very small* selection of "bad" web sites. I was able to break through We-Blocker's filtering control and ... (view more)