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

Vendors Scrambling to Fix Bug in Net’s Security

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is widely known as the indicator that, when invoked, ensures users their session is encrypted and the contents being transmitted is secure. The security protocol is used highly in e-commerce applications.

Recent discoveries have pointed out the vulnerabilities associated with SSL and that it is not as secure as one may think.

While there have been bugs that have dealt with the management of the SSL’s digital certificates, this flaw is with the protocol itself.

Subject to the vulnerability are shared hosting environments, databases, mail servers, and other secure applications. Fixes will need to be applied to Web browsers, Web load balancers, Web servers, mail servers, ODBC drivers, SQL servers and peer-to-peer protocols.

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Cybercriminals down five British police forces in a year

With nearly all of police daily operations depending on IT systems, five British police forces have been impacted by cybercriminals. The Internet attacks of the respective police forces caused outages lasting three or more days. It is unclear if any date was lifted through the five different breaches.

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Swedish spooks knocked offline by hack attack

Thought to be an attack due to Sweden’s new law allowing the country’s intelligence agency, FRA, to monitor all Internet traffic coming through the country. The outage began Monday night, lasting until Thursday morning.

An apparently separate denial-of-service attack was aimed at police and media outlets.

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EU offers hope to file-sharers

In an amendment applied to a larger telecoms bill verbiage regarding action against illegal file-sharers was watered down. Fearing that basically declaring the internet as a fundamental right for its citizens would conflict with how to go after illegal file-sharers, the Commission watered down the language giving ultimate responsibility to the member states on policing illegal content downloaders.

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