John Lister

Software developer Kevin Burke claims Virgin Mobile customers face an unacceptable risk of falling prey to hackers. Unlike many security issues, this isn't an unexpected bug that's produced by an oversight during the coding process. Burke says weak ... security within that system might allow hackers to hijack a user's phone number. According to Burke, he reported the problem a month ago but has not yet seen any sign that the firm is taking steps to fix it. He is now publicizing the issue in the hope of forcing Virgin Mobile into action. Six Digit Pin Insufficient The weakness stems from Virgin ... (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)

The company that conned cellphone owners into signing up for expensive data plans will now pay a $500,000 fine to the New York Attorney General's office. Game Theory LLC has also been told it must stop sending unsolicited texts. Game Theory is said ... to have sent more than 150,000 misleading texts in less than two months last summer. The texts told people that an unnamed person had a romantic crush on them and they could find out who it was by replying with the word 'yes.' It's not clear how many people replied affirmatively. While it's likely most people ignored the texts, an operation of this ... (view more)

A U.S. senator wants to close a legal loophole that allows law enforcement officials to read private emails without first obtaining a warrant. If successful, the change would mean users of webmail services, such as Gmail and Hotmail, will receive ... extra protection against prying eyes. Private email content is currently protected by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986. However, email usage is far greater today than it was then, and new procedures leave open the opportunity for officials to read private emails in secret. Years ago most email users downloaded their messages, which ... (view more)

US-based Internet firms will begin an anti-piracy partnership with major copyright holders by the end of 2012. However, it's a purely voluntary operation and customers thought to be pirating will get warnings before suffering any consequences. ... Several countries around the world, most notably France, have introduced "three strikes" legislation, under which customers suspected of illegally sharing copyrighted material get two warnings before having their Internet suspended or cut off altogether. These controversial laws have faced legal challenges. Critics argue it's unfair to punish people ... (view more)

On top of an existing jail term, one of the co-founders of The Pirate Bay website is facing even more legal trouble in his native Sweden. Meanwhile, Google has taken additional steps to make The Pirate Bay website less visible. Gottfrid Svartholm is ... one of four men convicted of copyright-related offenses linked to The Pirate Bay. Although it doesn't host any content, the website allows users to search for torrent files, which can then be used to share copyright protected data files. Svartholm Charged with Piracy, Hacking Prosecutors said The Pirate Bay site owners profited from illegal ... (view more)

Web hosting company GoDaddy suffered an outage this week that knocked thousands of small business websites offline. It appears hackers may have been responsible, but at the moment it's unclear exactly who was behind the attack. GoDaddy is best known ... for helping users register domain names, also called URLs or website addresses. However, GoDaddy also hosts millions of large and small websites, physically storing the data for the site's pages on GoDaddy's computers. GoDaddy Sites Down For Hours GoDaddy's customer websites and email services began suffering "intermittent outages" on ... (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)

The man convicted of infecting 72,000 computers has been sentenced to two and a half years behind bars. Joshua Schichtel created a network of hijacked machines and then -- for a fee -- allowed others to control them. Schichtel first came to the ... attention of authorities in 2004. At the time, he was part of a group charged with using infected computers to carry out distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Earlier DDoS Attack Goes Unpunished Under a DDosS attack, a hacker uses many computers to send service requests to legitimate website servers. Because servers are set up to respond to all ... (view more)