Provided by CommunityDNS, the information in this post consists of news items in the security-based Internet community.

Jury Exacts $32M Penalty From ISPs For Supporting Criminal Websites

In a landmark case, a federal jury in California fined two ISPs for their knowledge of criminal activity taking place from their respective ISPs. Together the two ISPs, Akanoc Solutions and Managed Solutions Group were fined a total of $32 million dollars for knowing counterfeits of Louis Vuitton goods were being sold from customers using the two ISPs, yet the ISPs did nothing to halt the activity despite previous warnings.

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Confiker borks London Council

Illustrating that Conficker is alive a well, the virus infected the local authority’s IT and voice-based VoIP systems. The virus entered the network through an employees thumb drive.

The incident took several days to clean up to the cost of £500,000 due to lost revenue and repairs. To guard against future infections a £600,000 bid is before the council for upgrades.

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Tech Insight: Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Exposed

Often misunderstood, XSS attacks tend to be more sophisticated and more dangerous than the form of attacks gaining greater attention, SQL injection attacks.

While SQL injection targets a specific web application or database server, an XSS attack on a web server affects anyone who visits the site. There are also three basic types of XSS attacks, DOM-Based, Reflected and Persistent. The attacks can use other forms of embedded active content, not just JavaScript.

• DOM-based attacks can use injected code that can result in the remote code execution with little or no user action necessary.

• Reflective attacks, the most common of XSS attacks, requires a user to click on a link.

• Persistent. While the first two require users to click a link to get to the site, the persistent form of XSS is the most dangerous as it does not require any link clicks. Persistent XSS is where people’s computers can become infected simply by visiting an infected site.

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Facebook Claims 65 Million Mobile Users

More than 65 million people are using Facebook through their mobile devices. At the beginning of 2009 the number was only at 20 million. In many cases the mobile device is the user’s primary computer platform; especially while traveling. Making this possible are applications that allow for interfacing with such popular sites.

Comment: From a potential trending perspective, hacks are emerging on the mobile stage. Might this be a signal of more mobile-based malware to come due to the current adoption rate?

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