Cybercrime

Click fraud is a growing problem for online advertisers who rely on paid search services. Marketing experts are urging e-commerce vendors have to take proactive steps to combat it. Online advertisers pay the search engine company hosting their ad a set amount of money each time a computer user click...

Count Jonathan Bingham among those who weren't all that surprised by the reputed breach of security that may have resulted in Cisco's guarded Internet Operating System source code being pilfered and posted on the Web. It's not that Bingham, a former Forrester Research analyst who is now president of...

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has revealed it has been working with attorneys general in 29 states to enforce existing fraud laws against auction scammers. Known as "Operation Bidder Beware," the effort already has resulted in 57 criminal and civil actions. "Having state and federal agencies co...

Instances of identity theft nearly doubled in 2002, topping the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's list of consumer complaints and accounting for 43 percent of the agency's fraud reports. In fact, identity theft ranked as the number one complaint for the third year in a row, with 161,819 reported insta...

On paper, Symantec appears to be one of the hottest tech companies around. Propelled in part by users' need to defend against a rash of destructive and well-publicized computer worms like Code Red, Nimda and SirCam, its stock price has jumped 70 percent in the past year. Nonetheless, leading industr...

The bad news is no secret, but it bears repeating: If you have bought anything online in the past several years, your personal information, including your home address and credit card number, is probably accessible via the Internet -- and available to people with less-than-noble intentions. Fortunat...

Recognizing that more consumers than ever would take to the Internet for holiday shopping this year, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission warned consumers to be cautious. Their first piece of advice: Deal with only those companies that you know and trust. But because the Web is a blind medium, sometime...

Made official last month by President Bush, the Department of Homeland Security consolidates 22 agencies, employing a total of 170,000 federal employees, under a single virtual roof. The question on many IT executives' minds is: What can my company gain from this reorganization? The department's 200...

In the wake of massive denial-of-service attacks on the Internet's DNS root servers, the likelihood of an attack that could crash the Internet -- and bring e-commerce to a screeching halt -- seems far greater than it once did. Every 24 hours of Internet downtime theoretically could mean more than $1...

Software development is a much different animal than it was 20 years ago. As program size has increased, so has the number of security flaws. In the latest disclosure by a major vendor, Microsoft announced a flaw in the SmartHTML Interpreter contained in Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions that co...

Allocating precious budget dollars is always a challenge in a down economy, and with security threats seeming to loom at every turn, CIOs are struggling mightily to gauge risks and decide how to face them. While the temptation may be to throw money at perceived security problems, decision makers ins...

Despite occasional but high-profile security breaches, shoppers have not been turned off by the online experience. Experts say the chances of being financially victimized remain low because of built-in consumer protection and heightened security awareness. But the consensus among analysts is that...

Hotels.com's offices were evacuated and its stock suffered a sharp drop after a white powdery substance was discovered in the company's mailroom. Local authorities in McAllen, Texas, ordered the evacuation of the Hotels.com processing center -- where about 100 people process reservations made thr...

For Web travelers seeking to lighten their load of usernames and passwords, help has generally been slow to arrive. Some relief for the forgetful has come in the form of functions -- installed on popular operating systems -- that serve to ease the mental burden of those surfing from a single comp...

Japan has deployed a mandatory identification network that requires each Japanese citizen to have an 11-digit identification number, similar to the Social Security numbers assigned to U.S. citizens. The network, dubbed Juki Net, is designed to modernize current paper-based government systems for ...