US criminals target corporate Web sites

Large corporate Web sites were heavily targeted by hackers in the early part of this year, according to the threat round-up report from US security firm Trend Micro.

Citing the report, Computing.co.uk says cyber-criminals launched SQL injection attacks on thousands of Web pages belonging to some of the largest companies in the US, as well as state government agencies and educational institutions.

Criminals are increasingly targeting affluent users, such as C-level executives, in the hope of accessing lucrative bank accounts and sourcing login credentials and e-mail addresses that span whole organisations.

Court papers have told the world what it already knows: Facebook is not worth $15 billion, says The Register.

That was the value Microsoft slapped on the social networking poster child last October when it forked out $240 million for a 1.6% stake in the company. But according to papers from the recently settled court case between Facebook and Harvard University dating site ConnectU, Facebook believes its common stock is worth only $3.75 billion.

The founders of ConnectU accused Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg of stealing their idea, and in February, the companies reached a secret agreement involving cash and stock. But ConnectU later backed out of the deal, claiming it was unenforceable, and Facebook turned back to the courts.

Europeans suspected of putting movies and music on file-sharing networks could be thrown off the Web under proposals before Brussels, reports The BBC.

The powers are in a number of laws that aim to harmonise the regulations governing Europe's telecom markets.

Other amendments added to the packet of laws allow governments to decide which software can be used on the Web. Campaigners say the laws trample on personal privacy and turn Net suppliers into copyright enforcers.

The international organisation that oversees the Web's top-level domain naming system said the hijacking last month of several of its domains was due to a security breach at the registrar that manages those URLs, says New York Times.

Although it did not name the registrar explicitly, according to WHOIS searches, New York-based Register.com manages the domains that were redirected, as well as the primary icann.org and iana.org domains.

Two weeks ago, Turkish hackers rerouted traffic to some of the domains used by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) and one of its subsidiary organisations, IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority).