Networking

Matthew Spaccarelli won $850 last month after suing AT&T for throttling his unlimited 3G data plan. He apparently found that the service was being reduced after only 2GB of data usage despite the fact that the company apparently offers 3GB at the same price.

Spaccarelli had originally asked the court to award him $10,000 and is apparently not interested in the $850 settlement, choosing instead to post AT&T's legal documents online and encouraging consumers in similar situations to follow suit.

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:

China will likely wait another two or three years to issue 4G licenses for LTE TDD networks, a top government official said, citing the need to build more 4G base stations, and to allow vendors time to develop handsets that can take advantage of the high-speed networks.

Last year's DNSChanger malware scam was an effort by a small crime ring of Estonian nationals to steal personal information. The scam worked by distributing malware that when installed would change the user's DNS settings to point to the crime ring's rogue DNS network. Since the DNS system is essentially the Internet's phone book, this allowed the crime ring to route seemingly valid Web site URLs to malicious servers.

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.

Within three months of the launch of the Internet "pornography" domain ".xxx," 10 cases have been launched against Web pirates registering sites on it using the names of reputable companies and people, insiders said on Monday.

Sources at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) reported that among complainants to its dispute resolution system over .xxx — usually called dot-triple x — were banks, a jewelry business and an online shopping operation.

Hackers seeking to breach security are ahead of most would-be business implementers when it comes to figuring out the detail of IPv6 and are more motivated, a Wellington seminar has heard.

Lesson one: It's pretty easy to use up all of your wireless data service for a given month. Lesson two: When you do that, the phone company says that it'll knock your speed down into 2G territory--and it's not kidding.

Here's what the T-Mobile terms of service say: “To provide a good experience for the majority of our customers and minimize capacity issues and degradation in network performance, we may take measures including temporarily reducing data throughput for a subset of customers who use a disproportionate amount of bandwidth.”

The number of malware threats that receive instructions from attackers through DNS is expected to increase, and most companies are not currently scanning for such activity on their networks, security experts said at the RSA Conference 2012 yesterday.

There are many channels that attackers use for communicating with their botnets, ranging from traditional ones like TCP, IRC and HTTP to more unusual ones like Twitter feeds, Facebook walls and even YouTube comments.

Cisco (NSDQ:CSCO) believes the network is where corporate security begins and ends and plans to build defenses against hackers and cybercriminals across its portfolio of networking gear, the vendor's new security executive said.

Chris Young, Cisco's first senior vice president responsible for the company's security strategy, spoke at the Cisco Media Day, held at a San Francisco hotel a few blocks away from the RSA Conference.