Brian McWilliams

In a move to counter industry pressure, MP3Board.com announced Monday it has filed suit against the Recording Industry of America. The filing aims to halt the RIAA’s attempts to shut down the mp3board.com Web site which provides hyperlinks to sites and files the RIAA maintains infringes on copyrights. “My client recently received a cease-and-desist letter […]

Another e-commerce company has been blackmailed by a computer criminal. The FBI Wednesday arrested a 36-year-old PhD candidate at Colorado State University, in connection with an attempted extortion plot against Audible Inc. Nelson Robert Holcomb is charged with sending a series of threatening emails last month to the New Jersey-based Audible, which sells downloadable spoken-audio […]

Taking a new angle in their legal attack on Napster, attorneys representing rapper Dr. Dre are asking the music sharing service to use an electronic signature technology called MD5 to start blocking specific MP3 files rather than the nearly 240,000 users of the service who’ve traded those MP3s. MD5 is a popular algorithm that creates […]

The discovery of a backdoor in another popular shopping cart program raises new questions about the overall security of the e-commerce software relied upon by small businesses. According to an advisory Thursday from Cerberus Internet Security in London, the main program file for CART32, a CGI program for 32-bit Windows systems in use by more […]

Attackers found a way to knock AboveNet’s routers senseless for several hours Tuesday morning. But the company downplayed fears that similar attacks could spread to other providers. AboveNet spokesperson Carol Nash Wednesday confirmed that the bandwidth and hosting company experienced a “direct malicious attack” on its infrastructure, but she declined to provide specifics on the […]

Internet service providers Thursday are being warned to batten down their network access servers against a familiar type of privacy attack that’s making a comeback. According to a bug-tracking group, so-called greyhat hackers say they have developed a Perl script that can quietly extract subscribers’ phone numbers and log-in names directly off an ISP’s terminal […]

The developer of a highly-rated ecommerce shopping cart is accused of building a software backdoor into the program that could give him or hackers complete control of the server on which it’s installed. The Dansie Shopping Cart, which is currently in use at more than 200 e-commerce sites and is recommended by several Web hosting […]

An old Internet scam has re-emerged in new clothes. At least two adult Web sites are allegedly conning visitors into downloading a piece of dialing software in order to view pictures for free, when in fact the users are unknowingly ringing up hundreds of dollars in long-distance charges. The sites, nocreditcard.com, and sexnocard.com, promise no […]

Self-diagnosed victims of the 911 Worm Thursday credited the FBI with protecting their hard disks from possible disaster. But others question whether the incident which began April Fools’ Day is just the latest example of Internet-induced virus hysteria. “If it wasn’t for list warnings, I wouldn’t have caught it on time, and it would have […]

An advisory from the FBI’s National Infrastructure Protection Center issued April Fool’s day set off hoax alarms across the Internet. But while anti-virus software vendors Monday confirmed that the 911 Worm is the real thing, some are puzzled by the FBI’s advisory and are openly questioning the severity of the worm. Typed in all capital […]

Responding to reports that it faces a dismal future, CDNow, the pioneering online music seller, went on the offensive Thursday. “The perception in the marketplace is profoundly wrong. My company will be able to get to profitability, and I’ve got more to leverage and build on than anyone you can think of,” said Jason Olim, […]

Before he was arrested by police in Wales last Thursday, the online credit card thief who called himself “Curador” worked as an e-commerce consultant, his former boss revealed Monday. As previously reported, an 18-year-old man in Clynderwen, Wales was arrested Thursday in connection with break-ins at nine e-commerce sites in recent weeks. Under U.K. law, […]