Alex Goldman

Social media phenoms Twitter and Facebook this morning suffered bouts of downtime — with each blaming a denial-of-service (DDoS) attack for its woes. Officials from the two companies have not said whether the two attacks are related. Microblogging site Twitter went offline for several hours this morning, and at press time, continues to suffer sporadic […]

Microblogging service Twitter this morning suffered downtime due to what company officials described as a denial-of-service attack. The site went offline for several hours, although some pages loaded sporadically. While Twitter said on its status page that the site was “back up” as of around 11 a.m. Eastern time, much of the site remained inaccessible. […]

A recent EU report says that Europe has more broadband subscribers and better mobile Internet penetration than any other nation on earth. The 114 million subscribers of the 27 EU member countries comfortably exceeds the 84 million broadband subscribers in the U.S. and 88 million broadband subscribers in China as reported by UK research firm […]

Almost a third of major antivirus products failed to perform up to expectations while running on Windows Vista, according to a new study by Virus Bulletin magazine. The study examined 37 antivirus products and found that 12 failed a suite of tests that included scanning a virus-laden Vista SP2 system for known malware, avoiding false […]

Was the best ad campaign of 2008 really the Obama-Biden presidential campaign? It was good enough to win the ad industry’s Cannes Lion grand prize, so maybe the 2008 campaign’s practitioners could provide some insight on a brief media contest that affected the whole world. No campaign could knock on the door of every voter […]

Complying with the energy industry’s NERC standard will not make energy companies secure, according to a report released today by security company LogLogic. “Compliance is necessary but not sufficient for security,” Dominique Levin, LogLogic executive vice president of marketing, told InternetNews.com. “Compliance is a good baseline and helps IT managers justify the security spend, but […]

The New Jersey State Police Cyber Crimes Unit charged Daniel Goncalves with identity theft and computer theft as part of their investigation into the theft of the domain name P2P.com from Albert and Lesli Angel and their investor partner Marc Ostrofsky, which allegedly occurred in 2006. It’s the first ever criminal prosecution for domain name […]

25 percent of all changes to firewalls are unnecessary, according to Avishai Wool, co-founder and CTO of firewall management software provider AlgoSec. With thousands of firewall rules arranged in a complex hierarchy, few system administrators have the time to check all the rules when a request for a rule change comes in, he told InternetNews.com. […]

With cyber warfare already a major component of countries’ and terrorist groups’ military efforts, it might seem surprising that the U.S. military refrained from unleashing its own cyber warfare arsenal when it had the chance. But the Pentagon’s decision to hold back during past conflicts for fear of the potential collateral damage — revealed in […]

UPDATED: Twitter, long under siege by malware that propagates through its popular system, is now filtering malicious URLs, according to a blog post by F-Secure chief research offer Mikko Hypponen. “Twitter hasn’t announced this, but we just noticed that they have now started filtering Tweets that contain links to known malware sites,” he wrote. He […]

Ten to 25 percent of broadband networks are likely infected by bots, and bots cause 90 percent of spam, according to the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), a coalition of security companies, bandwidth providers, and other interested parties. MAAWG has issued a report on the problem as well as advice for IT managers, titled “Messaging […]

In tough times and good times, IT needs to track the cash. That’s one reason why companies that invest now in business process management (BPM) software will be better positioned to take advantage of a recovery, according to a new survey by industry analyst firm Gartner. And while they’re waiting, businesses can use the software […]