Hacker

Vladuz, the Romanian hacker who repeatedly accessed off-limits parts of eBay's website and then publicly taunted company officials over the security lapses, has been handed a suspended three-year sentence, according to news reports.

The Bucharest appeal court issued the sentence on Wednesday to 23-year-old Vlad Duiculescu, AFP reported. He was arrested in Romania in 2008, with help from US Secret Service agents, after eBay said his exploits caused at least $1 million in damage. He was imprisoned for almost two years before being released last year.

The hack of Dutch certificate authority DigiNotar already bore many similarities to the break-in earlier this year that occurred at a reseller for CA Comodo. Bogus certificates were issued for webmail systems, which were in turn used to intercept Web traffic in Iran. Another similiarity has since emerged: the perpetrator of the earlier attacks is claiming responsibility for the DigiNotar break-in.

An Armenian hacker is claiming that Skype has failed to learn from prior security lessons, falling victim to a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability similar to one it patched in May, which would allow users to redirect victims to unwanted websites or run arbitrary code.

The May vulnerability allowed users to fool the Mac client of Skype into running arbitrary code as the client didn't check, or sanitise, instant messages to ensure they were free of malicious code.