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Indian ISPs get court relief, Torrent Sites Unblocked After weeks of confusion and frustration with blocked websites, the mess finally looks to be clearing. Indians are all heaving a sigh of relief because their ISPs have unblocked the access to the file-sharing, video-streaming BitTorrent sites that include The Pirate Bay, Torrentz.eu, Vimeo among others. It was in news last month that following Reliance, Airtel had also blocked torrent services and video sites after they received the ‘John Doe’ court order. Thousands of users from various states of India found the access to torrents blocked. India's Medianama is reporting today that the Madras High Court recently limited a badly drafted April ruling on the subject. The court said in its updated ruling, according to Medianama, which obtained a copy of it, that " the interim injunction is granted only in respect of a particular URL where the infringing movie is kept and not in respect of the entire website. Further, the a...

Intel CPU Vulnerability can provide control of your system to attacker The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) has disclosed a flaw in Intel chips that could allow hackers to gain control of Windows and other operating systems. The flaw has already been exploited on 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows 7, FreeBSD, NetBSD and there’s a chance Apple’s OS X may also be vulnerable. The flaw was disclosed the vulnerability in a security advisory released this week. Attackers could execute malicious code via kernel privileges or launch a local privilege escalation attack.  VMware's virtualization software is not affected, and neither are AMD's processors, as they do not use the SYSRET instruction whose incorrect handling causes the flaw or handle it differently.Many of the affected vendors have already pushed out an update that defuses the flaw. However, it said that while 32-bit operating systems are safe, " Intel CPUs that use the Intel 64 extension need th...

US and Israel developed Flame Malware against Iran Unnamed Western officials confirmed that Flame was developed by US and Israeli governments. The United States and Israel jointly developed the Flame computer virus that collected intelligence to help slow Iran's nuclear program. The massive piece of malware secretly mapped and monitored Iran’s computer networks, sending back a steady stream of intelligence to prepare for a cyber­warfare campaign, according to the officials. The effort, involving the National Security Agency, the CIA and Israel’s military, has included the use of destructive software such as the Stuxnet virus to cause malfunctions in Iran’s nuclear-enrichment equipment. The cyber campaign against Iran's nuclear program has included the use of another computer virus called Stuxnet that caused malfunctions in Iran's nuclear enrichment equipment. “ This is about preparing the battlefield for another type of covert action, ” said one former high-ranking U...

Linkedin sued by Member for Hacking Incident Illinois resident Katie Szpyrka filed a $5 million class action lawsuit against LinkedIn in the US District Court in the Northern District of California on June 15, claiming the business-oriented social networking site violated its own user agreement and privacy policy. The move comes in relation to a security breach around June 6 when LinkedIn admitted that encrypted passwords belonging to some 6.5 million of its 160 million users had been stolen and posted on the web. The incident resulted in hackers posting users’ information online but it is not yet clear how much data they obtained. Szpyrka, who pays a monthly fee of $26.95 for a premium LinkedIn account, says the networking site used an alarmingly weak encryption format whereby it failed to ‘salt’ the passwords before storing them. The suit alleges that LinkedIn failed to adequately protect members because it stored passwords in an unsalted SHA hashed format, which Szpryka c...

Hacker charged for hacking into U.S. Energy Department Andrew James Miller, a 23-year-old resident of Devon, Pennsylvania, was arrested on Thursday and charged with one count of conspiracy, two counts of computer fraud, and one count of access device fraud, according to a statement issued by the Justice Department's Criminal Division. According to the indictment, between 2008 and 2011, Miller and others allegedly remotely hacked into computer networks belonging to RNK Telecommunications Inc., a Massachusetts company; Crispin Porter and Bogusky Inc., a Colorado advertising agency; the University of Massachusetts; the U.S. Department of Energy; and other institutions and companies. The indictment alleges that when Miller hacked into the computers, he obtained other users’ access credentials to the compromised computers. He and his co-conspirators then allegedly sold access to these computer networks as well as other access credentials. After gaining unauthorized access to these...