Security

Using a method known as "cracking," the man who goes by the name Hacker Croll was able to break down Twitter security by trolling the Web for publicly available information, according to TechCrunch.

All right, listen up people: We have a problem. I thought we'd resolved this during our talk last year, but it turns out some people out there are still using spam e-mail as their personal shopping mall.

Yet another wave of Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Attacks hit South Korea today, despite the country standing on high alert for more cyber attacks.

An attacker who wants to break into one of your accounts manually might first try likely passwords such as your pet's name, your anniversary, or other terms that are significant to you. If that doesn't produce results quickly, a hacker might turn to a program that rapidly tries each of the thousands or even millions of words in a big list--a procedure known as a dictionary attack. Some dictionary attacks are quite clever, checking not only common English terms but also foreign words, common misspellings, words in which letters have been replaced by numbers or symbols (such as @ppl3 for Apple), and easy-to-type sequences of characters, such as poiuytre.

Sometimes, it seems scams are becoming almost as common as social media experts on Twitter. The latest one, unleashed Monday morning and initially noticed by tech blog Mashable, centers on a fake blog hosted at the domain twittersblogs.com. Tweets containing links to the site circulated rapidly, each featuring the message: "omg!! is it true what they wrote about you in their twit blog?"

Given the slew of embarrassing stories you've no doubt seen about users accidentally sharing too-personal information, the idea of preserving privacy on a social network may seem like going outside during a thunderstorm and expecting to stay dry.

Who should know more about PC threats than the company whose software makes most of them possible? Is Microsoft's upcoming, free anti-malware app the company's way of apologizing to customers?

Brian Ellis wants to know the best way to secure an old PC for a new owner.

Virtualization of the data center is provoking fundamental questions about the proper place for network security services. Will they simply disappear into the One True Cloud, dutifully following applications as they vMotion about the computing ether? Will they remain as a set of modular appliances physically separate from the server computing blob? Should everything be virtualized because it can be?

The Federal Trade Commission today announced it has taken down Pricewert LLC, a California-based ISP that it says "recruits, knowingly hosts, and actively participates in the distribution of spam, child pornography, and other harmful electronic content."