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Once again, the world tries to find a way to classify all hackers as terrorists, or to suggest that if given the chance, hackers will immediately turn to destroying the infrastructure of the world. And, once again, another inane situation such as a DDoS attack on a political website is seen as reason for comment. Go figure.

KYIV, Ukraine - Hackers from several countries launched a massive attack and temporarily disabled the website of Ukraine’s western-leaning President Viktor Yushchenko, his office said Tuesday. A Russian nationalist group claimed responsibility. The attacks from servers in Russia, Britain, Kazakhstan, the United States, Israel and Ukraine began Sunday night and continued through Tuesday afternoon, the presidential press service told The Associated Press.

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What an idea! Hide a CAPTCHA breaker in porn. You get what you want (free e-mail accounts in most cases), they get what they want (porn). Win-win.

A nifty little program that Trend Micro detects as TROJ_CAPTCHAR.A disguises itself as a strip-tease game, wherein a scantily clad "Melissa" agrees to take off a little bit of her clothing. However, for her to strut her stuff, users must identify the letters hidden within a CAPTCHA. Input the letters correctly, press "go," and "Melissa" reveals more of herself.

Read the rest here.

Just a side note, sorry I've been posting a lot of news stories this week, but I'm drained for material right now, so I figured sub-par content would be better than none.

This article pretty much summarizes how I feel about all social networking websites such as Facebook and Myspace - they're just huge dumps for saving all sorts of personal information you shouldn't be giving out. No matter what you use social networking websites for (ie: catching up with old friends, sending messages, etc.), it's possible to do these things without giving out excessive information, but people are often drawn to doing these things.

The idea of Facebook as a US government project makes a good conspiracy theory, but you don't need a tinfoil hat to realise that its 30-plus million users are storing huge amounts of personal data such as their address and interests on the service.If you use it to its full potential, you can share details not just of your interests, but your employment, educational history, sexual orientation, friends and family and even day-to-day activities. If you don't change the default privacy settings, you could be sharing that information not just with people you know but with entire cities or even countries that have made their own groups.

Read the rest here.

I couldn't help but notice this while I was doing my daily Stumbling. Just goes to show that hackers are mighty creative when it comes to protecting their assets.

The Storm worm is fighting back against security researchers that seek to destroy it and has them running scared, Interop New York show attendees heard Tuesday.The worm can figure out which users are trying to probe its command-and-control servers, and it retaliates by launching DDoS attacks against them, shutting down their Internet access for days, says Josh Corman, host-protection architect for IBM/ISS, who led a session on network threats.

Read the rest here.

Anyone who wants to SEO optimize their website or blog knows that they need to redirect all users to the same place so that search engines don't come up with duplicate information. It's very easy to do with .htaccess files, but if you aren't able to make those, you can also do it with PHP.

$site = "mysite.com";
if(strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'], "www.") !== 0){
	header("Location: http://www." . $site . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
}

Just change the $site variable, put it in the header of your site, and you're done