Paul Roberts

Interest in the U.S. midterm elections is being used to lure Web surfers to malicious Web pages that are pushing rogue antivirus programs, according to security firm Websense.

Following an embarrassing expose in the Wall Street Journal, Facebook has tightened its controls over the ways in which applications that use the social networking platform can share unique user identity information (or UIDs). The company also banned several applications accused of improperly disclosing user data. 

Law enforcement crackdowns in recent weeks have targeted two major contributors to worldwide spam: Spamit.com and the Bredolab botnet. Now a new report suggests that the two cases may be related. 

A new family of Trojan Horse programs is being used to stifle political opposition to the Communist Party in Vietnam, according to an analysis by researchers at SecureWorks. The Trojan, dubbed Vecebot, is a new family of malware  and has been linked to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against bloggers who have written critically of the ruling Communist Party and Chinese mining operations in the country, SecureWorks said. 

A raft of class action lawsuits filed in Federal court charge the globe’s biggest social networking
firms with violating federal communications privacy laws, allowing advertisers to profit from personal information harvested from users.

Endgame Systems is expanding from the government sector to commercial anti botnet services with a $29 million investment. 

Days after researchers at the ToorCon Security Conference in San Diego released a tool to hijack insecure Web sessions on Facebook, iGoogle and Flickr, a developer has released a similar tool, dubbed “Idiocy” that does the same for insecure Twitter sessions.