iknowthe.net | Internet and Ecommerce Consultant

Hundreds of thousands of websites appear to have been compromised by a massive cyber attack.

The hi-tech criminals used a well-known attack vector that exploits security loopholes on other sites to insert a link to their website.

Those visiting the criminals’ webpage were told that their machines were infected with many different viruses.

Swift action by security researchers has managed to get the sites offering the sham software shut down.

Code control

Security firm Websense has been tracking the attack since it started on 29 March. The initial count of compromised sites was 28,000 sites but this has grown to encompass many times this number as the attack has rolled on.

Websense dubbed it the Lizamoon attack because that was the name of the first domain to which victims were re-directed. The fake software is called the Windows Stability Center.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12933053

National Work Clubs

I have a new personal site at http://emmakane.co.uk/ just because I’ve had the domain for a while..

Facebook engineering intern Paul Butler used data taken from the firm’s massive Apache data warehouse.

Mr Butler chose ten million pairs of friends between cities at random and then stripped away any information that could identify the people behind them.

He then combined that data with each user’s current city and calculated the number of friends between each pair of cities. This data was then merged, in turn, with the longitude and latitude of each city. Supercool.

No big surprises in the latest data from Hitwise, December 2010