Brian McWilliams

Raphael Gray, the Welsh computer hacker who called himself Curador, will find out April 9 whether he’ll do jail time for breaking into several small online shops last year and stealing 26,000 credit card numbers. Calling himself the “Custodian of Ecommerce,” Gray hacked into nine sites during February of 2000, including Salesgate.com, VisionComputers.com, Promobility.net, and […]

DoubleClick confirmed Monday that two of its web sites have been penetrated by attackers. The ad-serving giant said no customer data has been accessed or affected by the intrusions, but security experts questioned whether the company was understating the impact of the incident. According to DoubleClick’s chief privacy officer Jules Polonetsky, unidentified attackers exploited a […]

EarthLink, Inc. Monday debunked reports that the nation’s number-two ISP has hidden a “super cookie” in its customized Internet Explorer browser. This weekend, participants in newsgroups operated by Gibson Research Corporation found what they thought was a unique tag in every User-Agent tagline, a piece of information sent by the Web browser every time a […]

Accused cybersquatters have a new defense strategy: “Get Froomkin.” Referring, of course, to Michael Froomkin — domain dispute panelist, professor of law at the University of Miami in Florida, ICANN gadfly, and outspoken critic of reverse domain name highjacking by trademark holders. In two surprising arbitration rulings in recent weeks by the World Intellectual Property […]

IBM’s Net.Commerce software was under renewed attack Wednesday, with the release by a hacking group in Denmark of a tool that can crack encrypted administrator passwords on some versions of the popular online storefront package. When combined with a recently reported security flaw in the macros function in Net.Commerce version 4.1 and version 3.1 as […]

Looks like idealab, the California investment firm, is doing an end-run around ICANN, the Internet governance board. Idealab today officially launched New.Net. It’s a start-up domain registration business, which is charging $25 per year for new Internet addresses using 20 new extensions including .xxx, .kids, and .mp3. New.Net is not in any way authorized or […]

Radiate, a CMGI-backed company that develops technology for placing ad-banners in third-party shareware software, has agreed to settle a class action lawsuit that accused it of creating spyware. Under the proposed settlement, Radiate has avoided making any financial payments to the class members, who include millions of computer users who downloaded between March of 1996 […]

A small glitch during a planned database upgrade by Bulkregister.com gave a big scare to some of its customers this weekend. When clients of the Internet’s second-largest domain registrar logged in to access their accounts Sunday, some found their domain records had apparently been modified and replaced with erroneous data. That quickly led many to […]

A computer prank gone awry will likely send the author of the Anna Kournikova email worm to jail, hackers and computer crime prosecutors predicted Friday. After turning himself in to police in his hometown of Sneek on Wednesday, the 20-year-old Dutchman was questioned and later released, pending a district court hearing that’s expected by the […]

Dutch privacy laws prevent local authorities from releasing the identity of the author of the “Onthefly” email worm, but an investigation by InternetNews Radio reveals all roads lead to the Anna Kournikova fan Web site of Jan Dewit. Information from newsgroups and Web postings helped to piece together the identity of the 20-year-old man, who […]

An unpatched security hole in online storefront software from IBM is potentially exposing scores of high-profile ecommerce sites to attacks from outsiders. The vulnerability in IBM’s Net.Commerce software could enable an attacker to gain administrative access to an online store. Such ability would allow an outsider to upload and download files, issue operating system commands, […]

Anti-spam activists Friday came to the defense of MSN Hotmail, after Microsoft’s Web-based e-mail service was criticized for the unauthorized blocking of some outgoing as well as incoming messages in its fight against junk email. Like many Internet service providers, Hotmail subscribes to the Realtime Blackhole List(RBL), a spam filtering service provided by the non-profit […]