Fahmida Y. Rashid

Egypt returned to the Internet on Feb. 2 after an unprecedented government-ordered Internet blackout. While the resumption of Internet service put Egypt’s residents and businesses back in touch with the outside world, it also put the spammers and hackers back in business. While analyzing global spam volumes during the five-day shutdown, SophosLabs researchers noticed that […]

U.S. senators who want to give the president power to shut down the Internet denounced Egypt’s president for essentially doing the same thing. “The steps the Mubarak government took last week to shut down Internet communications in Egypt were, and are, totally wrong,” said Senators Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, Susan Collins of Maine, and Tom […]

The United States government has a special e-mail system that will allow information to be transmitted even if a foreign government cuts off the country’s news and Internet communications with the rest of the world, according to a report from the Broadcasting Board of Governors, an independent U.S. agency responsible for all non-military international broadcasting. […]

Security researchers have identified several new malware strains claiming to take away users’ access to Facebook over the past few days. Users receive messages, either via instant message, e-mail or on Facebook, claiming that their accounts will be shut down. However, the scams promise to restore access if the users follow instructions, the researchers said. […]

GigaSpaces Technologies launched on Jan. 31 its eXtreme Application Platform 8.0, a virtual application platform that can transition existing infrastructure into the cloud, the company said. The XAP 8.0 platform modernizes older infrastructure into distributed architectures, virtualized environments and the cloud, Uri Cohen, product manager at GigaSpaces, told eWEEK. The application platform is suitable for […]

The last IP address blocks in the IPv4 namespace will be automatically assigned to the organizations overseeing the net address assignments three months earlier than expected. The Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC), the organization that oversees net addresses in the Asia-Pacific region, requested and received two blocks of addresses from the Internet Assigned Numbers […]

Researchers at Core Security Technologies issued an advisory warning on Jan. 31 about two stack overflow vulnerabilities in Cisco WebEx applications. These vulnerabilities grant attackers code execution privileges on the machine, according to Core Security. The stack-based overflow vulnerabilities were found in the WebEx player, used to view archived WebEx presentations, and in WebEx Meeting […]

AppRiver’s new SecureSurf Web-filtering application combines Domain Name System lookups with proxy routing to filter potentially malicious content from Internet traffic. Businesses can use SecureSurf to block Websites containing malicious content as well as to enforce corporate browsing policies, Joel Smith, CTO of AppRiver, told eWEEK. When a user attempts to visit a Website, SecureSurf […]

Firehost added a Security View feature to its customer portal to give IT managers a detailed overview of the types of attacks hitting their systems, the secure hosting provider said Feb. 1. FireHost uses a variety of virtualization technologies to protect customers from hacking attempts, malware and other attacks, the company said. The attacks were […]

Fortinet updated its FortiWeb security appliance to harden critical Web applications containing sensitive and confidential data from identity theft, fraud and data leaks, the company said on Jan. 31. The 4.0 MR2 firmware update consolidates Web application firewall, XML filtering, Web traffic acceleration and load balancing into a single FortiWeb appliance, Idan Soen, a product […]