Anne Saita

Researchers Find Stuxnet Older Than Previously Believed

Researchers on Tuesday said they have proof the Stuxnet worm used to cripple Iran’s nuclear program has been in the wild two years longer than first believed. There’s also now evidence the military-grade malware’s origins date back to 2005, and possibly earlier.

‘Six Strikes’ System Flags P2P Piracy and Throttles Broadband Connections

The entertainment industry is teaming with five major Internet service providers to this week launch a new Copyright Alert System that will first warn online pirates and then start to strangle bandwidth of repeat offenders.Dubbed “Six Strikes,” the new system began roll out Monday, putting consumers on notice that content owners would be monitoring for illegal downloading or uploading of copyrighted movies, music and televsion shows and notifying participating ISPs such actvitity is detected.


A non-profit association for IT professionals in higher education announced Tuesday its server had been breached.Educause, which has 1,800 college and 300 corporate members, issued a warning that it had discovered a security breach sometime in February that may have compromised the hashed passwords of .edu domain holders and urged impacted administrative, billing or technical contacts to change their passwords.

A former Minnesota state employee was charged Thursday with misdemeanors for allegedly accessing thousands of driver’s licenses during a four-year period and storing 172 of them in an encrypted file. Ninety percent of victims in the data breach were women.John A. Hunt, 48, of Woodbury, Minn., faces six misdemeanors, including misconduct by a public employee and unauthorized computer access. He is accused of illegally querying the state Driver and Vehicle Services database more than 19,000 times between 2008 and last October. If convicted, he could receive up to a year in jail and $3,000 in fines.

Two days after the group Anonymous boasted it had broken into a government Web site and had the data dump to prove it, the U.S. Federal Reserve admitted it was hacked.”The Federal Reserve system is aware that information was obtained by exploiting a temporary vulnerability in a website vendor product,” a spokeswoman told Reuters Tuesday. “Exposure was fixed shortly after discovery and is no longer an issue. This incident did not affect critical operations of the Federal Reserve system.”

Google Chrome users, among others, couldn’t access some of the most popular Web sites Monday after an advertising network’s corporate Web site was injected with malware. But, according to the ad company’s chief executive, those sites were safe.Those who called up sites such as The Huffington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and many other media sites, among others, were greeted with a warning that the sites contained malware.