A 19-year-old UK man accused of taking part in an attack on the website of the Serious Oranised Crime Agency was denied bail during a brief court hearing on Thursday. Ryan Cleary didn't enter a plea to the five offenses Metropolitan Police leveled against him on Wednesday, according to media reports. The judge at the …

UK officials have formally accused a 19-year-old man of involvement in Monday's attack on the website of the British Serious Organised Crime Agency and two previous web-based assaults directed at the music industry. Ryan Cleary was charged with five offenses in all, according to a press release issued Wednesday by the …

LulzSec, the hacking and prankster collective that has attacked the US Senate, Sony, and the Fox and PBS television networks, has struck again, claiming it was behind an assault that took down the website for the Central Intelligence Agency. Attempts to access cia.gov on Wednesday afternoon were met with only limited success. …

Federal authorities have raided the home of a suburban Washington family after tracing a crippling attack on the website of Kiss frontman and anti-piracy crusader Gene Simmons to an internet connection there. According to an affidavit filed by FBI Special Agent Scott Love, the distributed denial-of-service attacks on www. …

Police in the UK have arrested a 22-year-old county Cleveland man in their investigation into web attacks waged by the Anonymous hacking collective against companies accused of retaliating against WikiLeaks, The Telegraph reports. The unnamed suspect was questioned by specialist computer-crime detectives at a local police …

A computer programmer was sentenced to two years in prison for unleashing crippling attacks on rollingstone.com and other news websites that published humiliating accounts of an adulterous online affair he pursued with a fictitious woman. Bruce Raisley was also ordered to pay $90,383 in restitution for the distributed denial-of …

Attacks that have wreaked havoc on dozens of South Korean government websites over the past week have included another nasty surprise: a malicious payload the causes the infected machines recruited to carry out the assaults to spontaneously self-destruct. The DDoS, or distributed denial-of-service, attacks were first spotted on …

WordPress came under massive attack on Thursday, causing disruptions for many of the sites that rely on the webhosting platform to publish their content. “WordPress.com is currently being targeted by a extremely large Distributed Denial of Service attack which is affecting connectivity in some cases,” Sara Rosso, a …

WikiLeaks supporters are milking Twitter's application programming interface to carry out attacks that have led to crippling slowdowns at MasterCard.com, Visa.com and other websites that cut off funding to the whistle-blower outfit. A relatively new Java-based version of the Low Orbit Ion Cannon, which protesters use to direct …

Whitehat hackers are tracking a new botnet that's quickly become a popular platform for launching web attacks. Over the past few weeks, members of the Shadowserver group have observed the Darkness botnet unleashing distributed denial of service attacks on more than 100 websites in the financial, insurance and retail industries …

Microsoft has released a general-purpose software tool for assessing the security of applications, part of a growing suite of free offerings designed to help third-party developers design safer programs. Microsoft Minifuzz is a lightweight file fuzzer, a type of tool that detects software bugs by throwing random data at an …

A federal judge has cleared the way for the trial of two men accused of waging a cyber attack on a webhosting company so they could demonstrate the effectiveness of their botnet to potential customers. The trial of Thomas James Frederick Smith, 21, most recently of Parris Island, South Carolina, and David Anthony Edwards, 20, …

Microsoft has promised to patch a serious flaw in newer versions of its Windows operating system after hackers released exploit code that allows them to take complete control of the underlying machines. The flaw, which affects various versions of Windows Vista, 2008, and the release candidate version of Windows 7, resides in …

CommentApple is once again playing security catch-up to the rest of the computing world, this time with an update for the Leopard version of its Mac operating system that patches critical holes in Java that were fixed on competing systems 29 days ago. The patch updates Leopard to Java versions 1.6.0_15, 1.5.0_20, and 1.4.2_22, which …

Microsoft has confirmed a vulnerability in its Internet Information Services webserver and spelled out the conditions under which it can be exploited to give an attacker complete control of the server on which it runs. The good news: As previously reported, remote execution of malicious code can be triggered only in limited …

Last year's cyber attacks that brought internet traffic to a standstill in Georgia were carried out by civilians and Russian crime gangs, in some cases with the unwitting help of websites and software companies located in the US, according to researchers. In a report released Monday, a non-profit research group called the US …

Linux developers have issued a critical update for the open-source OS after researchers uncovered a vulnerability in its kernel that puts most versions built in the past eight years at risk of complete takeover. The bug involves the way kernel-level routines such as sock_sendpage react when they are left unimplemented. Instead …

For the past couple weeks, Twitter has come under attacks that besieged it with more traffic than it could handle. Now comes evidence that the microblogging website is being used to feed the very types of infected machines that took it out of commission. That's the conclusion of Jose Nazario, the manager of security research …