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...

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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,...

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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,...

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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 add...

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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...

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