Russia

The upper house of the Russian Parliament passed a bill on Wednesday that the nation's IT industry believes has high potential to lead to Internet censorship.

A Russian programmer who released a hack allowing iOS users to steal paid app content has thwarted Apple's attempts to fix the flaw.

Alexey Borodin published a video on YouTube outlining how users could avoid paying for in-app purchases without even having to gain root access to the system. All they needed to do was install two security certificates and change the DNS settings on their device.

The Citadel trojan is being pulled underground by its authors who fear an impending law enforcement crackdown, researchers at security firm RSA said this week.

Citadel, built on the shoulders of Zeus, was one of the most advanced and quality trojans available, with a sales price of nearly $2,500.

Hackers shut down a United States online video company on Wednesday that was being used by Russian activists to stream live video of protests in Moscow, prompting the company’s leaders to launch a Russian-language version of the site.

Russia has climbed up the global spam rating and now ranks third internationally and first in Europe, according to Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report.

The country’s ever-increasing hacker activity also took Russia up to sixth place in the global Internet malware activity rating. Last year, the country was tenth. Among the top five are the US, China, India, Brazil, and Germany. 

Russian-speaking hackers earned an estimated US$4.5 billion globally using various online criminal tactics and are thus responsible for 36 percent of the estimated total of $12.5 billion earned globally by cybercriminals in 2011, Russian security analyst firm Group-IB said in a report published on Tuesday.

A Russian national living in New York has been charged for his alleged role in a ring that stole approximately $1 million by hacking into retail brokerage accounts and executing sham trades, U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey Paul J. Fishman announced today.

The U.S. Department of Justice has charged a Russian national living in New York for his alleged role in a $1 million scheme that hacked into retail brokerage accounts and executed fraudulent trades.

Petr Murmylyuk, also known as Dmitry Tokar, of Brooklyn, New York has been charged with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, unauthorized access to computers and securities fraud. The Securities and Exchange Commission is also filing a parallel civil suit. He remains in state custody facing charges from a separate investigation.

Russian police have arrested eight men they suspect of running the multimillion dollar Carberp phishing scam in which victims were tricked into handing over millions of dollars over the past two years.

The Carberp Trojan used by the gang came into play in 2010 and was often found lurking on Facebook; users who had the misfortune of encountering the Trojan were redirected to a compromised Web page that exactly mimicked a legitimate Facebook page, except that it informed them their account was "locked."

A security researcher based in Russia pocketed a cool $60,000 from Google on Wednesday after he submitted a a "full exploit" for a vulnerability in the difficult-to-compromise Chrome browser.

The winning entry was part of the inaugural Pwnium contest, in which Google is offering up to $1 million in prizes for bug hunters who can find a way to defeat its browser's much-vaunted sandbox architecture. The competition occurs at the annual CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, British Columbia and coincides with the well-known Pwn2Own contest, run by HP TippingPoint.