Ryan Naraine

An active exploit targeting a known denial-of-service vulnerability in Cisco routers and switches has been released on the Internet, prompting security research firms to increase the threat level. Cisco , which dominates the market for switching and routing equipment used to link networks, issued a patch Thursday to plug the security hole. But the availability […]

Former Napster backer Bertelsmann AG has filed a motion in a New York court to dismiss three massive lawsuits filed by record labels alleging its financial support of the defunct P2P network contributed to widespread piracy of copyrighted works. The $17 billion suit, filed by a group of songwriters and two independent music publishers and […]

Cisco has issued an alert for a denial-of-service vulnerability in routers and switches running its Cisco IOS software and configured to process IPv4 packets. Cisco, which dominate the market for switching and routing equipment used to link networks said a rare sequence of crafted IPv4 packets sent directly to the vulnerable device may cause the […]

Software behemoth Microsoft on Wednesday issued patches for three security holes detected in the Windows platform, including a “critical” vulnerability that could allow code execution. Research firm ISS X-Force raised its alert level to AlertCon 2 for the buffer overflow vulnerability in the RPC Interface, warning that it poses an “enormous threat.” “Exploitation of this […]

The cat and mouse game between the recording industry and the public peer-to-peer networks has spun around again with StreamCast Networks adding an anonymizer feature to its popular Morpheus service. The Los Angeles, Calif.-based StreamCast released Morpheus 3.2 as a “spyware-free version” that seeks to thwart efforts by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) […]

Online retail heavyweight Buy.com on Wednesday confirmed plans to launch a paid download digital music service to piggyback on the success of Apple’s iTunes. A spokesperson for the Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based Buy.com said the service would be branded iMusic and launch on July 22 with a massive promotional campaign in New York City’s Times Square. […]

With the threat of litigation hovering over the heads of online music swappers, Nielsen//NetRatings is reporting a sharp drop in file-sharing on P2P networks. While copyrighted music files are still available for download on the P2P networks, statistics from Nielsen//NetRatings show that traffic dropped more than 15 percent in the first week after the Recording […]

New York-based video compression company On2 Technologies has struck a deal with Intel to optimize its flagship codecs for use with the chip giant’s Pentium 4 microprocessor. On2, which markets the VP5 and VP6 codecs that offer high-quality video resolution at heavily reduced data rates, said it would provide Intel with its codec and player […]

A European trade group on Thursday linked organized crime syndicates to the US$5 billion underground industry for music piracy and sounded a call for governments to get involved to squash piracy rings internationally. The U.K.-based International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), which represents 1,500 record companies in 70 countries, said more than one billion […]

A ‘critical’ security vulnerability in Microsoft’s HTML Converter has put millions of PCs at the risk of intrusion, the software giant warned on Wednesday. Microsoft’s

The Apache Software Foundation on Monday released a new version of its open-source Web server project to plug four potentially serious security holes. The latest update to the Apache 2.0 HTTP Server (version 2.0.47) is described as a security and bug fix release to plug holes that could lead to denial-of-service attacks . The Foundation […]

Intrusion detection specialists Internet Storm Center (ISC) on Monday raised an alarm for a fake PayPal site using a valid SSL to dupe users into giving up personal information. By using a legitimate SSL certificate to masquerade as a PayPal site, scammers are now adopting trickier techniques to perpetuate identify theft that are not as […]