Networking

The Pirate Bay has added a new IP address to access the popular website, in the intention of helping users in the U.K., the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy bypass their countries' court-mandated blockades, reports TorrentFreak.

Virgin and Orange, two U.K. Internet providers, have already blocked The Pirate Bay. Five more of the largest Internet providers in the U.K., including Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, and O2, will also have to implement the block before the end of May.

Today Google announced it would be leading a campaign to notify users whose PCs were infected by the DNSChanger malware. The malware was part of a scam that came to light last November when the U.S. Department of Justice accused seven Estonian and Russian men of orchestrating several different kinds of Internet fraud schemes. Users were infected with DNSChanger after they clicked malicious links or downloaded tainted software.

The malware sent infected computers to DNS servers that redirected millions of victims to websites they had never intended to visit.

Manipulating the internet's domain-name system (DNS) to reduce the impact of criminal malware DNSChanger has proved successful. Extending the technique to deal with other matters, however, represents the thin end of a wedge, according to DNS pioneer Dr Paul Vixie.

The FBI said that in 2007, DNSChanger infected 4 million computers worldwide, altering their settings so that they used DNS servers provided by the criminals, which allowed them to redirect the users to fraudulent websites.

A video released by Tenable Security showing a visualization of an office network is pretty wild. Using different colors and lines users can pin-point problem areas based on traffic and data being sent and received to each machine.

The system lets you call out various aspects of the network using marker shape, color, and network lines. For example, you can change symbol colors depending on vulnerabilities and even change the shape and position of mobile devices. You can see a little more of the visualization over here.

In the online struggle for network security, Kansas State University cybersecurity experts are adding an ally to the security force: the computer network itself.

Scott DeLoach, professor of computing and information sciences, and Xinming "Simon" Ou, associate professor of computing and information sciences, are researching the feasibility of building a computer network that could protect itself against online attackers by automatically changing its setup and configuration.

The Netherlands has become the first country in Europe and only the second in the world to pass Net Neutrality legislation. The new law forces ISPs to treat all traffic equally and, crucially, also prevents them from peering too much into what the users are sending and receiving via their networks. 

There's been plenty of talk around the world about this type of legislation, but it's a controversial subject, not least because ISPs, copyright-dependent companies, police and government agencies and so on, don't want anything like this ever becoming law.

Internet criminals are sidestepping the need to launch DDoS attack from large networks of malware-compromised bot PCs by using simpler server 'booter shells', mitigation firm Prolexic has warned.  

'Booter shells' or plain 'booters' are simple PHP, .ASP or Perl script template files planted on compromised servers to direct Get/Post commanded HTTP floods to overload target servers.

Terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba has developed its own VoIP network that connects its members over GPRS networks, according to the Times of India.

UK and US authorities have both declared Lashkar-e-Taiba a proscribed terror organisation. The group's aims include India ceding sovereignty over Kashmir. Members of the organisation participated in the 2008 attacks on Mumbai.

Ed Lasher has a simple way to measure how cool his job is—he just counts how many people have offered to carry his bags on a service call. Lasher is the owner of YachtComputing LLC, a small IT business with a very exclusive niche: installing and maintaining networks and Internet connectivity aboard “superyachts,” seagoing mansions owned by wealthy individuals and charter companies. “It’s a distinct category—bigger than yachts, bigger than mega-yachts,” said Lasher. “It’s the very top end of the private yachting industry.”

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) has revealed more details on the problems afflicting its submission system for generic top level domains that forced it to take the system offline and extend the submission deadline.

The organisation first announced there was an issue earlier this month, revealing that some information submitted by firms applying for a new domain may have been visible to one another in the process.