Anne Saita

AMD ‘Hackette’ Serves as Warning to Patch, Patch, Patch

Web administrators using the popular Wordpress platform should heed the cautionary tale of microprocessor maker AMD and make sure they update their Web sites to secure vulnerabilities.

The company site was hacked over the weekend by someone called “r00tbeer” said to be part of a small enclave called r00tBeer Security Team. The bounty: 189 accounts in a SQL database that amounted to 32kb of data. The leaked information included usernames, email addresses and salted passwords of AMD employees and public relations personnel.


In order to limit malicious use, Twitter is closing ranks around its API and requiring application developers use authentication in its upcoming new release. The company announced Thursday afternoon in a blog post that it was introducing new restrictions in v1.1 to create a “more consistent Twitter experience” and to limit malicious use of the API.

The controversial document-sharing site WikiLeaks was back online Monday evening after sustaining a week-long distributed denial-of-service attack.

The organization apparently received some extra capacity and assistance from Web performance and security firm Cloudfare to counter the 10 gigabits per second of bogus traffic that overwhelmed servers for numerous WikiLeaks domains and several supporters’ sites.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission today announced it had finalized its settlement with Facebook, which is  now subject to biennial privacy audits for the next 20 years and requires its nearly 1 billion users opt in to any future privacy policy changes.