From Dark Reading

Tens of thousands of bots are cracking CAPTCHAs and joining websites in order to steal information, extort mone

Botnets increasingly are creating phony online accounts on legitimate websites and online communities in order to steal information from enterprises.

This alternative form of targeted attack by botnets has become popular as botnet tools have made bots easier to purchase and exploit. Merrick Furst, botnet expert and distinguished professor of computer science at Georgia Tech, says bots are showing up "en masse" to customer-facing websites -- posing as people.

Defends Windows security despite Google's no comment on dropping OS
On the heels of a report that Google will phase out Windows in its workplace over security concerns, Microsoft on Tuesday stood up for its operating system.

Microsoft's counterattack was a turnaround from earlier in the day, when the company declined to comment on a story published Monday by the Financial Times. The newspaper cited several unnamed Google employees who said the company is dumping Windows because of worries about security.

From The Register:

Ofcom confirms Hull as freetard capital

The details of internet users who are accused of unlawful filesharing three times will be recorded on a blacklist so record and film companies can target legal action, rules published today reveal.

From ComputerWorld

It may be OK for identity theft protection vendor Lifelock to publish its CEO's Social Security number, but when it comes to other company employees, that's another story.

The company has asked the Phoenix New Times to remove a police report from its Web site after discovering that it contained a redacted Social Security number of Lifelock employee Tamika Jones. The number could be read by simply cutting and pasting the PDF document into another word processing program, a common problem with poorly-redacted documents.

From Dark Reading

Google Chrome also prone to similar attacks

Apple fixed the so-called "carpet bomb" vulnerability in its Safari browser for Windows after Microsoft issued a security advisory about it in July 2008, but to date the very same flaw in Safari for OS X is still unpatched.

From ARS Technica

The privacy issues that have been hounding Facebook may be coming to a head. A report in the Wall Street Journal indicates that the Facebook, along with MySpace, Digg, and a handful of other social-networking sites, have been sharing users' personal data with advertisers without users' knowledge or consent.

The data shared includes names, user IDs, and other information sufficient to enable ad companies such as the Google-owned DoubleClick to identify distinct user profiles. Some of the sites in question, including MySpace and Facebook, stopped sharing the data after the Journal asked them about it. The surreptitious data sharing was first noticed (PDF) by researchers from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and AT&T Labs in August 2009, who brought it up with the sites in question. It wasn't until WSJ contacted them that changes were made.

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From Neowin:

Pakistan is blocking the video sharing website YouTube one day after ISPs in the country received a court order to block Facebook. BBC News is saying reports are leading them to believe a number of Wikipedia and Flickr pages are also being censored. Pakistani officials say YouTube has been blocked because of its "growing sacrilegious content".

From Dark Reading

VeriSign will refocus business on Internet infrastructure, naming services
VeriSign, one of the best-known names in computer security, today took a step away from the security business by selling its authentication services business to Symantec for $1.28 billion.

From  Computer World

A CEO who publicly posted his Social Security number on billboards and in TV commercials as part of a campaign to promote his company's credit monitoring services was the victim of identity theft at least 13 times, a news report says.

The Phoenix New Times reported that Todd Davis, CEO of LifeLock Inc. in Tempe, Ariz., was victimized numerous times by identity thieves who apparently used his Social Security number to commit various types of fraud.