A team of Swiss researchers presented a new malware/spam source detection algorithm in a paper entitled “Locating the source of diffusion in large-scale networks” in the Physical Review Letters journal on August 10. The novelty consists of estimating the source of an outbreak within a network based on measurements applied to “sparsely placed observers or sensors” as opposed to all nodes of the network. This...

WikiLeaks delivers new inside intel that brings to light government and corporate big names’ supposed plans to use TrapWire, a spy tool designed to help prevent terrorist attacks, as reported by zdnet.com. TrapWire was developed by Abraxas Corporation and, according to its technical specification, was intended to cover a very precise need: “the prevention of terrorist attacks on critical infrastructure requ...

Approximately 2,500 patients of Stanford Hospital & Clinics and the Stanford University School of Medicine may have seen their personal data exposed after a physician’s password-protected laptop was stolen July 15 or 16, as reported by cmio.net. “University officials stressed that based on tracking software installed on the computer, there is no evidence that the private information has been accessed an...

A new Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) report on “recent cyber crime trends, new twists to previously-existing cyber scams” released on August 8 outlines fake free credit services, a fake political survey, a spoofed Microsoft update and other threats reported by thousands of victims. The report, which aggregates information from law enforcement bodies and from complaints submitted to the IC3 to raise a...

A Facebook page containing racially offensive memes targeting Australian Aboriginals  was met with a fiery reaction from Internet users, as reported by SBS.  The social network initially refused to pull it down, stating “we were not able to confirm that the specific page you reported violates Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities”.  An online petition launched by Brisbane resident Jacinta O’Ke...

News of Gizmodo’s Twitter account getting hacked last Friday , as reported by Forbes, was met with concern as to how exactly the attacker did it. With the discovery that former Gizmodo employee Mat Honan’s e-mail and Twitter accounts had been illicitly accessed, came a possible answer. It was initially suspected his passwords were not strong enough. After strenuous digging, Honan retraced the hacker’s steps...

Reuters saw its blogging platform and its Twitter accounts temporarily misappropriated by propaganda supporting the Free Syrian Army. On August 3, hackers secure illicit access to the Reuters News’ blogging platform and post a fake interview with Free Syrian Army head Riad al-Asaad. "Reuters.com was a target of a hack on Friday. Our blogging platform was compromised and fabricated blog posts were falsely at...

An old timer of the social scam trade – a lose weight advertisement - is now adorned with links to Yahoo! groups. Scammers manage, in this way, to tune up their masterpieces of deceit in such a way as to persuade both the public at large and scam detection engines, which would not normally ban Yahoo! links. The message that helps spread the scam is basically: “if you want to lose weight you should try HCG! ...

Messages spreading via Yahoo! Messenger or via the e-mail deliver an interesting offer for 18+ eyes only. Recipients are invited to a Facebook-like network overtly declared or subtly implied to provide participants with adult entertainment. The combination of baits in these cases is brilliant: Facebook or Facebook-like friend requests from unknown persons are already part of the arsenal of online socializat...

A 2 month hackathon on a remote tropical island is one of these days’ hot topics of discussion these days on the ycombinator forum, as reported by the BBC. Project comehackwithus aims to bring together coding masterminds looking for an exotic location attractive enough to merit the travel, while also allowing potential participants to focus on work. Like all other ambitious “looks like fun, but it’s just wo...