A 25-year-old Frenchman has been arrested for trying to gain access to President Barack Obama’s official Twitter account, as well as other notable public figures. The man, whose name wasn’t released, is unemployed but obviously has some technical skill up his sleeve. French police official Captain Adeline Champagnat said the suspect was able to retrieve passwords from Twitter administrators. From there, he was able to log in and see personal data from every Twitter account holder. Champagnat said there was evidence that he looked specifically at the official accounts of politicians and music/movie stars, but didn’t cause any real damage.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has lost market share in major European markets, such as France, Britain and Italy, after the U.S. software firm started to make it easier for European consumers to use competing browsers. Microsoft’s pledge to allow easier access to rival browsers in Windows by the middle of May, ended a long antitrust dispute with the European Union. The company has started to send a choice screen, where consumers can easily click on rival browsers, to almost 200 million old and new computers. According to web statistics firm Statcounter, Internet Explorer’s share of all Web surfing has in March dropped in France by 2.5 percentage points from February, in Britain by 1 percentage point and in Italy by 1.3 points.
last week there have been a lot of reports from the users of an antivirus program called BitDefender. The owners of this program could not start their PC if they were running 64-bit version of Windows. The experts have concluded that the cause has been in the recent update, that made the program think that some core system files were infected with Trojan.FakeAlert.5. The software is now free of this defect, and a special set of instructions has been released for those, who have lost their PC’s to this error.
Facebook’s 400 million users have been targeted by a spam run that could infect their computers with malicious software designed to steals passwords and other data. Over the last two days, millions of messages have been sent. The messages appear to come from Facebook, with a return address that looks legitimate but has been spoofed, such as “help@facebook.com”. The messages say that the user’s Facebook password has been reset and the user should download an attachment that contains the new password. The English-language messages are grammatically correct, but contain an odd sign-off: “Thanks, Your Facebook.” The attachment is actually a Trojan horse program, which infects a computer without any visible signs, the spam run contained a variety of malware programs, including password stealers, rogue antivirus programs or botnet code.
Computer hackers are targeting Facebook users with an email scam that attempts to steal their passwords. Some users of the world’s most popular social networking site were receiving emails that appeared to be from Facebook informing them their Facebook password had been reset and to click on an attachment to retrieve it. The attachment is actually a “password stealer” that is installed when a user clicks on it and can potentially access any username and password combination on that computer, not Facebook-related information. Please watch out for this new threat and keep your passwords to yourself .
The sudden takedown of an Internet provider thought to be helping spread one of the most promiscuous pieces of malicious software out there appears to have cut off criminals from potentially millions of personal computers under their control. But the victory was short-lived. Less than a day after a service known as “AS Troyak” was unplugged from the Internet, security researchers said Wednesday it apparently had found a way to get back online, and criminals were reconnecting with their unmoored machines. Botnets are networks of infected PCs that behave like criminals’ remote-control robots. They steal identities en masse and are used to attack Web sites. But instead of a slam-dunk victory, the incident wound up highlighting the whiplash pace at which criminals can resurrect their illicit businesses after what should have been a devastating setback.
Google Inc. will sell the online services of other business software makers in an effort to fill its own product gaps and persuade more companies to rely on applications piped over the Internet. The online store that was announced late Tuesday marks another step in Google’s crusade to convert the world to “cloud computing”, the idea of running applications in Web browsers instead of installing them on individual hard drives. The information entered in the programs also is stored in data centers run by third parties such as Google.
If you use Google Docs and Microsoft Office, you’ll appreciate the new Outlook sidebar from Mainsoft. Called Harmony, and currently in beta, the sidebar lets you share, e-mail, download, upload, and edit your Google Docs right from your desktop using Outlook 2007. Starting on Tuesday, Harmony is available as a free download from Mainsoft’s Website, and there is also a version for Microsoft SharePoint users
Apple’s latest move in its big App Store spring clean is to get rid of Wifi scanning applications. It’s already removed porn apps, but now it’s turned its feather duster on ’stumbler’ applications that seek out available Wifi networks. Users can still search for hotspots using apps which take advantage of the iPhone’s GPS capabilities – the ban only applies to those applications which actively search for a connection. The reason isn’t clear, but may be related to the fact that it is in certain circumstances and certain territories illegal to hook into an open Wifi connection – if you’re using your neighbor’s connection, for example. Alternatively, it may be a technical issue related to 802.11 radio functionality.
Evidence from the recent Aurora hack attacks on major American corporations suggest that many may have tightly locked virtual front doors, but no cybersecurity inside their systems, a McAfee expert warned on Wednesday. In a Security Insights blog post, Paul Kurtz, McAfee’s chief technology officer, discussed his study of the December-through-February attacks on Google, Intel, Adobe Systems, and other large firms.
He concluded that “Many organizations have tight security around financial systems and other mission-critical systems, but leave their intellectual-property repositories broadly accessible. The company might have strong perimeter security, but once you’re in, the [source code] is readily available.”