Internet

A study released today shows that an alarming 51% of website traffic on the Internet are not actually humans but come from automated programs, most of which are malicious.

The study done by Incapsula, a provider of cloud security for websites, claims that most of this "non human" traffic is invisible because it does not show up on analytics software. The data was apparently collected from a sample of 1000 websites that are enrolled in to the Incapsula service. The breakdown of the 51% of "non-human" traffic is as follows:

Comodo Group has issued a maintenance release for its anti-virus and firewall package which addresses some significant bugs.

Windows 7 x64 users for example may have come across a situation where loading corrupted EXE files could result in a blue screen of death. In addition situations in which a smart scan would cause a crash have also been fixed.

The latest build number is 5.10.228257.2253 and is available for immediate download.  

All those computer users whose Internet access was about to be cut off by the FBI can breathe a bit easier.

Late yesterday (March 5), federal Judge Denise Cote granted the federal government another 120 days to keep running several Domain Name System servers that were keeping hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions, of infected computers online.

The clock is running out on IPv4 on the Internet, but even so the next generation of Internet traffic protocols, IPv6, is being adopted very slowly. But, it seems IPv6 is finally making it to broad acceptance. Arbor Networks reports that the “latest milestone in IPv6 development: the first observations of IPv6 Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

The Iranian government has yet again blocked all encrypted international websites outside of Iran that depend on the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol ahead of parliamentary elections in that country.

The latest web censorship affected Email, proxies and all the secure connections that depend on the SSL protocol, which display addresses beginning with "https." Last week, more than 30m Iranian internet users were unable to access their e-mail accounts, including Gmail and Microsoft's hotmail.

On Tuesday, Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum suggested that we don't have effective copyright enforcement on the Internet because we just haven't tried hard enough:

Something that's good enough to provide a measure of IP protection that works for the vast majority of non-supermen and isn't too unwieldy. Is that really any more unlikely than the invention of the internet itself? I'm not sure why.

As hackers expose widespread cybersecurity lapses and heighten fears about defending critical infrastructure from attack, one proposed solution has started gaining traction: Rather than attempt to tighten security on the modern Internet, it suggests creating an entirely new one.

Earlier this month, former CIA Director Michael Hayden became the latest figure in Washington to call for a separate, secure Internet to shield vital systems like the power grid from cyber-attacks. The new commander of the military's cyberwar operations, Gen. Keith Alexander, has also endorsed the idea.

Your company's data is only as secure as the weakest security of the most fly-by-night website to which anyone in your organization has ever given their password.

Think about that for a moment: One of your summer interns used the same password on your company intranet as they use on the hacked-together open source message board on which they swap stories with their friends about how awesome it was to do whippets around the campfire at last year's Bonnaroo.

Most Australian internet users will have their web access censored next month after the country's two largest internet providers agreed to voluntarily block more than 500 websites from view.

Telstra and Optus confirmed they would block access to a list of child abuse websites provided by the Australian Communications and Media Authority and more compiled by unnamed international organisations from mid-year.