Stories by Jeremy Kirk

Students plan to press Irish data commissioner on Facebook

A group of students concerned over Facebook's privacy practices plans to continue to press the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) for action following a meeting on Monday in Vienna with representatives of the social networking site.

BTJunkie voluntarily closes file-sharing website

The BitTorrent search engine BTJunkie has shut down its website, the latest file-sharing site to take defensive action following law enforcement's shutdown of MegaUpload last month.

Malware automates storing of data haul on file-hosting site SendSpace

Trend Micro researchers have discovered a piece of malicious software that automatically uploads its stolen data cache to the SendSpace file-sharing service for retrieval.

Anonymous releases recording between FBI, UK law enforcement

The politically-motivated hacking group Anonymous released on Friday a 17-minute recording of a conference call between U.S. and British law enforcement agents coordinating an ongoing investigation into the group.

RIM offers free PlayBook to attract Android developers

Research in Motion is trying to woo developers by giving a free BlackBerry Playbook tablet to coders who port their Android application for its BlackBerry Tablet OS.

WikiLeaks' Assange takes appeal to UK Supreme Court

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange launched his appeal in the U.K. Supreme Court on Wednesday in his last attempt in Britain to avoid extradition to Sweden to face sexual assault allegations.

Kelihos botnet, once crippled, now gaining strength

A botnet that was crippled by Microsoft and Kaspersky Lab last September is spamming once again and experts have no recourse to stop it.

Student privacy activists due to meet with Facebook

Austrian student activists say they expect to meet Facebook representatives in Vienna next Monday in an attempt to resolve their disagreements over the social-networking site's privacy policies.

Industry group makes fresh push to eliminate phishing

Companies such as Facebook, Google and PayPal are pushing for widespread use of a new technical specification, DMARC, that could make it harder for phishers to reach their victims.

CloudPassage launches new security product for public clouds

CloudPassage is launching a new security product for virtual servers in public clouds such as Amazon Web Services that it says takes care of the all-important need for security when using services from infrastructure providers.

European Parliament says its website taken offline by attackers

The European Parliament's website fell under a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDOS) on Thursday in what the organization classified as retaliation for the shutdown of the Megaupload file-sharing site and an anti-counterfeiting trade agreement.

Teleconferencing vendors defend product security features

Teleconferencing vendors say they're trying to strike the right balance between security and usability after security researchers found they could dial in to the conference lines of major companies and manipulate video cameras to spy on boardrooms.

Microsoft names alleged Kelihos botnet creator

Microsoft has named a Russian man as the alleged creator of Kelihos, a spammy botnet that abused the company's Hotmail service until the botnet was shutdown last September.

Hacker releases 100,000 Facebook log-in credentials

A hacker who claims to act in defense of Israel has released 100,000 credentials of allegedly Arab users of Facebook in an ongoing row between Israeli and Arab hackers.

FileSonic disables file sharing after MegaUpload arrests

An online storage service, FileSonic, has disabled file sharing between users following the takedown of the MegaUpload service for alleged copyright infringement violations.