A Mississippi man pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to charges that he threatened to reveal security weaknesses in the Web site of electronics seller Best Buy unless the company paid him $2.5 million.
Federal prosecutors charged Thomas E. Ray III with two counts of extortion for allegedly sending threatening e-mail messages to Best Buy under the guise of "Jamie Weathersby" between Oct. 16 and Oct. 30 last year.
Adrian Lamo, the so-called homeless hacker accused of breaking into The New York Times' computer network, is planning to appear in court Thursday to accept a plea bargain.
Lamo, who is facing a pair of federal felony charges for allegedly breaking into The Times' network and running up the bill on a subscriber-only news-archiving service, surrendered to the FBI in September and is out on bail.
A US court has awarded Symantec, best known for its antivirus and security software, a $3 million judgment against Baltimore-based Maryland Internet Marketing for selling counterfeit Symantec software.
An Oslo appeal court cleared a 20-year-old Norwegian man of DVD piracy charges on Monday in a new setback for Hollywood studios which say unauthorized copying costs them billions of dollars a year.
Upholding a verdict by a lower court in January, the court said that Jon Johansen had broken no laws by helping to unlock a code and distribute a computer program on the Internet enabling unauthorized copying of DVD movies.
An Ohio man could face a prison term and court-ordered restitution for his admission in court that he looted an Arkansas-based company's computer system of customer information.
Daniel J. Baas, 25, of Milford, pleaded guilty Thursday in U.S. District Court and was ordered to be kept in jail without bond until he is sentenced in about two months.
In an agreement with federal prosecutors, Baas admitted that he stole the data between January 2001 and January 2003 from Acxiom Corp. and stored the information on computer disks at his home.
A former employee of American Eagle Outfitters was sentenced to 1 1/2 years in federal prison on Tuesday for posting passwords online to the retailer's Web site and orchestrating an Internet attack.
Kenneth Patterson, 38, of Greensburg, must also pay more than $64,000 in restitution as part of his September guilty pleas to password trafficking and computer damage. He could have been sentenced to a maximum 11 years in prison and fined as much as $350,000.
A former employee of American Eagle Outfitters was sentenced to 1 1/2 years in federal prison on Tuesday for posting passwords online to the retailer's Web site and orchestrating an Internet attack.
Kenneth Patterson, 38, of Greensburg, must also pay more than $64,000 in restitution as part of his September guilty pleas to password trafficking and computer damage. He could have been sentenced to a maximum 11 years in prison and fined as much as $350,000.
TELEPHONE GIANT AT&T has filed a legal action against Ebay and Paypal claiming that the auction giant is breaching patents it owns.
According to the law suit, filed in a US federal court yesterday, both Ebay and Paypal technology breaches an AT&T patent for transactions using trusted intermediaries processes payments over the Internet.
The US giant wants Ebay and Paypal to compensate it for using what it claims is its technology.
The patent in question is 5,329,589, which describes "Mediation of Transactions by a Communication System".
Gateway's former chief executive, Jeff Weitzen, and two of its other former executives were charged with fraud Thursday by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which alleged the parties engaged in manipulating earnings results to meet Wall Street expectations.
John Todd, former chief financial officer, and Robert Manza, former controller, also were charged with fraud.
A Californian web designer was fined and sentenced to community service this week after he admitted to hacking into the web site of Arabic satellite TV network Al Jazeera during the war in Iraq. John William Racine II, 24, posed as an Al Jazeera worker to obtain passwords that allowed him to re-route surfers intending to visit Al Jazeera to a site featuring an American flag and the motto "Let Freedom Ring" (captured by defacement archive Zone-h here). Racine was sentenced to 1000 hours community service and a $2000 fine on Wednesday by US District Judge Howard Matz.
