According to an FBI affidavit obtained by Wired News, agents trying to track the source of e-mailed bomb threats against a Washington State high school last month sent the suspect a secret surveillance program designed to surreptitiously monitor him and report back to a government server.
A study just published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine suggests that a lot of advice we have been giving young people about Internet safety may be off the mark. The researchers found no evidence that sharing personal information online increases the chances of online victimization, which the study found is more likely to result from other online behavior, like talking about sex with people met online and intentionally embarrassing someone else on the Internet.
Reuters reports that hackers stole information from the Department of Transportation and several private companies by luring employees with fake job-listings in ads and e-mail. Victims included several companies that provide security services to government agencies.
Information Week reports on warnings that iPhone users should avoid using a feature that lets them make phone calls over the Web. According to some security experts, the Web dialing feature can be used by attackers to track calls or redirect them to a number the attacker chooses.
According to a new research report, attacks on domain name servers remain a serious headache for many organizations. Almost half admitted having recently experienced either a pharming or cache poisoning attack, with one-third reporting denial-of-service assaults. However, only 17 percent said that a failure of their DNS would be their worst nightmare. That result puzzled the researchers and led them to conclude that many organizations still fail to grasp the gravity of DNS threats.