John Lister

In taking advantage of a security loophole, hackers have hijacked as many as four million website pages over the past week. It's thought to be the biggest attack of its type, ever. The attacks have been dubbed LizaMoon, named after the first ... destination to which visitors of hijacked sites were redirected. The hijack campaign has proven to be incredibly successful: on the first day, security firm Websense estimated 28,000 web sites were affected, but within three days that figure had risen to 500,000. Two days later and the number of affected pages were estimated to be as high as three or four ... (view more)

A computer security company has apologized after its software mistakenly reported that new Samsung laptops carry malicious software. The confusion was due to security software labeling a legitimate folder directory as being infected. The claims were ... first made by tech writer Mohamed Hassan in an article for Network World. He wrote on Monday that after buying a new Samsung laptop, he ran a security software check and found two cases of a keylogger known as Starlogger. A keylogger is a malicious application that records all keystrokes made by the user and returns them to the application's ... (view more)

Microsoft has announced that it won't be sending out Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) by automated update until the end of June this year. Originally, the plan was to send the Internet Explorer 9 update as an automatic download, providing the Windows ... Automatic Updates feature was enabled. The timeline for the automated update was to be scheduled for March 21, but that has since changed because Microsoft says the delay is a necessity due to its widespread corporate use. (Source: zdnet.com ) Internet Explorer 9 Rollout Cause of Delay Two-Fold There are two reasons being given for the June timetable. ... (view more)

The European Union (EU) has come under harsh criticism of late for upgrading its computer networks to Windows 7 without first considering other operating systems. It's just emerged that at a "secret meeting" last December, the European Commission ... (which is the administrative wing of the EU, responsible for applying the laws produced by elected politicians) decided to upgrade computers across the European political system to run Windows 7. (Source: pcworld.com ) Controversial Decision Gives MS Big Boost The controversial element of the decision was that it was made without putting the ... (view more)

The organization that oversees the distribution of Internet domain names has given final approval to ".xxx", a domain dedicated to adult subject matter. The new domain is known as a generic top-level domain, meaning it is the final part of a website ... address and isn't country-specific (like .ca for Canada and). This is the first new top-level domain since 2004's .pro for professionals. It could be the last to get specific approval, as there are plans to open up the system so that individuals and organizations can register and control their own top level domains using any word or ... (view more)

Microsoft looks to be working on an interactive television product, likely in the form of a set-top box. That would put it in direct competition with rivals Apple and Google. Speculation about the move has been spurred by the fact that a Microsoft ... executive's company bio has been revised. Tom Gibbons, who'd previously worked in Microsoft's general hardware and mobile devices divisions, is now listed as the company's "corporate vice president of TV & Service Business". Given his background, it does seem logical that he'd be working on physical devices in the new role. According ... (view more)

A recent nation-wide survey investigating sleeping habits has linked the use of technology with insufficient sleep. But the findings may not be that clear-cut. The details come from the National Sleep Foundation, a non-profit group aiming to tackle ... sleep-related health issues and thus cut the number of tiredness-related problems. It surveyed 1,500 people aged 13 to 64. The two most prominent figures are that 43 per cent of those questioned say they rarely, if ever, get a decent night's sleep on weeknights, and that 95 per cent of people use electronic devices in the hour before bedtime. ... (view more)

Microsoft has announced that Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) supports two separate technologies for restricting access to information related to a user's online activity. One of the privacy features was recently prompted by the Federal Trade Commission ... (FTC). Both technologies involve the way websites share data with third-parties. The most prominent example is with advertisements that appear on a page; for example, rather than simply linking ads to the page content (such as a newspaper site running golf equipment ads alongside a golf match report), a site might pass on details of all the pages a ... (view more)

Hackers are actively exploiting a bug that involves both Windows and Internet Explorer. Google believes the hackers may be targeting specific users. The bug involves MHTML, which is a special format designed to combine all the different files of a ... web page, such as the coding for the text and layout, the image files and video files, into a single file. It was originally developed as a way for a user to save an entire webpage to their desktop without winding up with a messy collection of files, but can also be used as a web link. The vulnerability involves the way that Internet Explorer and ... (view more)