LimeWire has agreed to pay record labels US$105 million to settle a lawsuit

LimeWire has agreed to pay record labels US$105 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that the file-sharing service allowed its users to infringe copyright, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced late Thursday.

Thirteen record labels, in a lawsuit filed in August 2006, alleged that LimeWire was "devoted essentially to the Internet piracy" of music. Judge Kimba Wood of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered LimeWire to stop distributing its peer-to-peer software in October of last year.

The out-of-court settlement came after a jury trial that focused on damages to be paid by LimeWire and CEO Mark Gorton began in New York last week.

"We are pleased to have reached a large monetary settlement following the court's finding both LimeWire and its founder Mark Gorton personally liable for copyright infringement," RIAA Chairman and CEO Mitch Bainwol said in a statement. "As the court heard during the last two weeks, LimeWire wreaked enormous damage on the music community, helping contribute to thousands of lost jobs and fewer opportunities for aspiring artists."

Bainwol called the settlement a "reason for celebration by the entire music community."

The settlement reinforces the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling against P2P vendor Grokster in 2005, Bainwol added. The court ruled that Grokster and StreamCast Networks can be held liable for copyright infringement committed by users.

The settlement and the Grokster case show that "designing and operating services to profit from the theft of the world's greatest music comes with a stiff price," Bainwol said.

LimeWire's lawyer, Joseph Baio of Willkie Farr & Gallagher in New York, wasn't immediately available to comment on the settlement.

LimeWire.com's home page has a note about the injunction issued by Wood. "We further remind you that the unauthorized uploading and downloading of copyrighted works is illegal," the note said.

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400% increase in Android malware since 2010.

A record number of security threats and highly targeted Wi-fi attacks are currently attacking enterprise and consumer mobile devices, with devices on the Android platform facing a 400% increase in malware.

The information released by Juniper Networks in a report titled "Malicious Mobile Threats Report 2010/2011" said that cyber criminals have focused their attention to mobile devices.

"In a recent survey of large businesses, we found that nearly 40 percent considered smartphones the device type posing the largest security threat now," said Jeff Wilson, principle analyst, Security at Infonetics Research.

SMS trojans cause the most threat, causing 17% of all reported infections. In addition, the greatest distribution point for mobile malware is application download, yet not many smartphone users use an antivirus solution on their mobile device.

"These findings reflect a perfect storm of users who are either uneducated on or disinterested in security, downloading readily available applications from unknown and unvetted sources in the complete absence of mobile device security solutions," said Dan Hoffman, chief mobile security evangelist at Juniper Networks.


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63% of participants said that they were strictly advised not to use social media sites at work.

Almost half of UK firms (48%) have banned their employees from accessing social networking sites at their workplaces in the last year, according to research carried out by HCL Technologies and Lewis PR.

63% of participants said that they were strictly advised not to use social media sites at work.

However, 45% of employees felt that their bosses were afraid of negative comments about them and their firms on the websites as opposed to productivity problems.

"It is quite remarkable that in this day and age, many employers are still putting their employees' interests as a low priority by not allowing them to use sites like Facebook," Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies said.

"Facebook is such a popular application that is so widely used for personal and business uses, it makes no business sense to ban it," he added.


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Sony has announced that it will begin restoring its online PlayStation video game network on Sunday.

The phased restoration of services will begin in the US, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the Middle East.

The move comes more than three weeks after Sony discovered a huge security breach that led to the theft of personal data from millions of users.

The firm said its expects to have the network, including Qriocity services, fully restored by the end of May.

The restoration of Japanese and Asian services would begin soon, it added.

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For as low as three pennies an hour, hackers can rent Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN)’s servers to wage cyber attacks

For as low as three pennies an hour, hackers can rent Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN)’s servers to wage cyber attacks such as the one that crippled Sony Corp. (6758)’s PlayStation Network and led to the second-largest online data breach in U.S. history.

A hacker used Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud, or EC2, service to attack Sony’s online entertainment systems last month, a person with knowledge of the matter said May 13. The intruder, who used a bogus name to set up an account that’s now disabled, didn’t hack into Amazon’s servers, the person said.

The incident helps illustrate the dilemma facing Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos: Amazon’s cloud-computing service is as cheap and convenient for hackers as it is for customers ranging from Netflix Inc. (NFLX) to Eli Lilly & Co. (LLY) Last month’s attack on Sony compromised more than 100 million customer accounts, the largest data breach in the U.S. since intruders stole credit and debit card numbers from Heartland Payment Systems in 2009.

“Anyone can go get an Amazon account and use it anonymously,” said Pete Malcolm, chief executive officer of Abiquo Inc., a Redwood City, California-based company that helps customers manage data internally and through cloud computing. “If they have computers in their back bedroom they are much easier to trace than if they are on Amazon’s Web Services.”

Sony on May 14 partially restarted its PlayStation Network and Qriocity services, which had been shut since April 20 because of the intrusion. The company has hired three security firms to investigate and is working with the law enforcement officials. Sony has faced a backlash from regulators and customers over the time it took to warn customers that their data may have been stolen.

Search Warrant

Drew Herdener, a spokesman for Seattle-based Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, declined to comment. Amazon didn’t respond to a request to speak with Bezos. Patrick Seybold, a U.S. spokesman for Tokyo-based Sony, declined to comment beyond public statements made on the matter.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation will likely subpoena Amazon or seek a search warrant to access the history of transactions, trace who had access to the specific Internet address at the time and get details on payment data, said E.J. Hilbert, president of the security company Online Intelligence and a former FBI cyber-crime investigator.

FBI Special Agent Darrell Foxworth, a spokesman for the agency’s San Diego office, said he couldn’t comment on whether the bureau served Amazon with a search warrant or subpoena and that investigators are following up “each and every lead.” Amazon’s Herdener declined to say whether his employer had been subpoenaed or served with a search warrant.

Amazon Web Services leases computing space to companies so they don’t have to buy their own servers to store data and handle a surge in visitors.

‘Bad Guy’

Prices for EC2 range from 3 cents to $2.48 an hour for users in the east coast of the U.S., according to its website. Signing up to the service requires a name, e-mail address, password, phone number, billing address and credit card information. Users get an automated call from Amazon and are asked to dial in a four-digit verification code to complete the registration process.

That’s not enough to scare off hackers seeking to conduct attacks anonymously, and Amazon doesn’t have the means to detect illegal uses of its servers, Abiquo’s Malcolm said.

“Realistically, Amazon can’t do anything to prevent it,” Malcolm said. “There is no way of telling who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy.”

Web Services generated about $500 million in revenue for Amazon in the past year, according to estimates at Barclays Capital. That’s about 1.5 percent of 2010 sales at Amazon, which doesn’t disclose sales from the unit.

Security’s Role

Amazon fell $3.51, or 1.7 percent, to $202.56 on May 13 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares have added 13 percent this year. Sony lost 23 yen to 2,241 yen in Tokyo and has slid 23 percent in 2011.

As companies from Amazon to Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) build server farms worldwide, the services can help hackers hide their tracks, said Hilbert.

Cloud services are also attractive for hackers because the use of multiple servers can facilitate tasks such as cracking passwords, said Ray Valdes, an analyst at Gartner Inc. Amazon could improve measures to weed out bogus accounts, he said.

Hijacked Servers

The use of hijacked or rented servers to launch attacks is typical for sophisticated hackers, according to Hilbert. Chinese hackers used the servers of a major U.S. Internet service provider in 2008 to break into a government agency and several defense contractors, according to a secret Nov. 3, 2008, cable exposed by Wikileaks.

The hackers “used at least three separate systems at the unnamed ISP in multiple network intrusions and have exfiltrated data via these systems,” according to the cable.

In some cases, hackers hide their tracks beneath several layers of proxy servers that can span the globe. A recent attack against computers in South Korea was controlled from servers in more than 20 different countries, according to Georg Wicherski, a security analyst at Santa Clara, California-based McAfee Inc. (MFE) The identity of the offenders is unknown, he said.

Malicious attacks in the U.S. are on the rise. They made up 31 percent of data breaches in 2010, up from 24 percent a year earlier, with each event costing U.S. businesses an average of $7.2 million, according to a March report by the Ponemon Institute. The study found that about 85 percent of all U.S. companies have experienced one or more attacks.

Rethinking Cloud

Last month’s incursion was “very carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated criminal cyber attack,” Sony has said.

The episode will cause individuals and companies to rethink what data to put on the cloud and force companies to potentially double what they spend on application security, said Murray Jennex, an associate professor at San Diego State University who specializes in computer systems security. In the long run, it will be cheaper than being hacked, he said.

“This puts cloud computing into proper perspective,” Jennex said. “Everybody’s been thinking it’s chic and ignoring the security aspect. I think this reminds companies that things that make them great need to stay under their control.”

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