A look into the latest security news

A lot changes in the security world with every passing day. Here is a brief roundup of some crucial developments that you may have missed out on.

Twitter outage leaves millions speechless

Bringing back memories of its nascent stage, Twitter crashed yesterday. Not once, but twice. The first crash occurred at 9 am PDT and was seemingly resolved. But within the next hour another crash occurred. Twitter claimed on their blog that this was caused by a ‘cascading’ error. However, some conspiracy theorists are not satisfied and claim that Twitter was actually hacked into. You be the judge of that.

High Court lifts ban on P2P sharing sites

The Madras High Court has lifted the ban on content sharing sites like Pirate Bay and Vimeo. The issue has caused controversy ever since Anonymous (the hacktivist group) got involved. They carried out several denial of service attacks and even organized a set of protests, which didn’t quite go as planned. Nevertheless, the court that started the trouble in the first place has unblocked the sites. They have also passed a ruling stating that only links hosting pirated content should be blocked, and not entire websites. Thanks, Anonymous.

Hackers bidding for App Store account details

The going rate for a stolen Apple App Store or iTunes Store account password? About $35. That’s the price hackers are paying to acquire stolen passwords. Apple noticed something fishy when they suddenly received complaints of unauthorized purchases being made in Australia, TOI reported. Hackers are using these details to make purchases that run into thousands of dollars, but Apple security is on it. Hopefully, this will be the last that we hear of how ridiculously low our passwords are valued.

Dropbox blocks stolen Xbox 360 successor files

A recently leaked report about the future plans of the ‘Xbox 720’ caused quite a stir. Microsoft went a step ahead to lend authenticity to the report by getting websites to remove the content. But people who stored the file in their Dropbox account also found access to this report blocked. Does this mean that cloud storage companies read our content? Their privacy rules grant them access to copyright violating documents but how do they know what documents violate copyrights? This should make you wonder about the security over such clouds and stop you from storing sensitive information there.

Rahul Thadani