Hackers interrupted Internet access in various parts of the Islamic Republic of Iran yesterday after attacking a number of the country’s infrastructure and communications companies, a state official told the Reuters news agency.

A slew of major American banks, some already stressed by a stream of DDoS attacks carried out over the past 10 days, may soon have to brace themselves for a large-scale coordinated attack bent on pulling off fraudulent wire transfers.

When Google told users in June that it was going to start warning them about attacks on Gmail accounts that the company believed were coming from state-sponsored groups, it looked like an announcement that only would affect a tiny percentage of the company’s users. Journalists, activists and dissidents seemed like the target base. Now, Google officials say that they have seen a new wave of attacks and has issued warnings to more users as a result.

Is the Java browser plug-in the IT equivalent of the human appendix? Would you miss it if it were gone? Probably not, experts say, especially now that attackers are beating the Java sandbox with a rash of zero-day exploits.

Several Web sites in Sweden, including the nation’s central bank and two government affiliates, were hit with attacks this week, supposedly in retaliation for a police raid on an Internet company tied to The Pirate Bay, the world’s largest file sharing site.That site also was offline until Wednesday, but its officials say it was due to broken Power Distribution Unit.

The United States District Court of Maryland ruled in favor of the Federal Trade Commission on Sept. 24, imposing a judgment of more than $163 million against the managers and directors of an enterprise whose sole function the FTC alleges was to defraud its customers with scareware.

One of the things that makes attackers dance around their basement lairs is finding unencrypted Web sessions. Sites that don’t give users the option to use HTTPS make life that much easier for attackers trying to hijack users’ Web sessions or eavesdrop on them. The IETF has taken a big step toward making that more difficult, approving the HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) proposal as an Internet-draft.