A Swedish security professional that posted the usernames and passwords for 100 e-mail accounts belonging to various nations' embassies and political parties revealed on Monday that he exploited the improper usage of the Tor network -- a distributed system of computers that anonymizes the source of network traffic -- to collect the information.

In total, Egerstad collected the e-mail credentials of more than 1,500 government workers, corporate employees and private individuals using the Tor network, he said. Because the technique is already known, Egerstad decided that fully disclosing the list of e-mail accounts and passwords for 100 of the government accounts was the best way to bring more attention to the issue.

Following the posting of the information to his Web site, a few countries did respond. India, Iran and Uzbekistan were friendly and supported the manner in which he disclosed the issue, he said. China filed a criminal complaint over the posting, while U.S. authorities complained to his Texas Web provider and had his original Web site taken down, Egerstad said.

He pointed to exit nodes run by hacking groups as potential ways of getting information for identity fraud, while massive nodes located in Washington D.C. and at the Space Research Institute in Russia are possible intelligence gathering tools for the U.S. and Russian governments, respectively.

We've had a report that the popular scambaiting site 419Eater and the anti-scam site Scamwarners are the latest anti-spam sites to fall victim to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Both sites are down at this time.

There's good reason to believe that the Zhelatin (Storm Worm) gang have been behind a number of other DDoS attacks this year, including an attack against anti-spam sites and download sites operated by a rival spam gang.

Other attacks have targeted blacklists, anti-malware and -spyware sites, and general 'umbrella' sites like Spamhaus. (Although Spamhaus is probably under attack 365 days a year, so it may be hard to distinguish an attack from background noise). The current attack, with its focus on anti-scam sites, seems to fit that pattern.

The Storm worm botnet has grown so massive and far-reaching that it easily overpowers the world's top supercomputers.

"In terms of power, the botnet utterly blows the supercomputers away," said Matt Sergeant, chief anti-spam technologist with MessageLabs, in an interview. "If you add up all 500 of the top supercomputers, it blows them all away with just 2 million of its machines. It's very frightening that criminals have access to that much computing power, but there's not much we can do about it."

Sergeant said researchers at MessageLabs see about 2 million different computers in the botnet sending out spam on any given day, and he adds that he estimates the botnet generally is operating at about 10 percent of capacity.

"We've seen spikes where the owner is experimenting with something and those spikes are usually five to 10 times what we normally see," he said, noting he suspects the botnet could be as large as 50 million computers. "That means they can turn on the taps whenever they want to."

The botnet actually is attacking computers that are trying to weed it out. It's set up to launch a distributed denial-of-service attack against any computer that is scanning a network for vulnerabilities or malware.

China's military successfully hacked into the Pentagon's computer network, it was reported reported Tuesday, although the Chinese government dismissed the accusation as groundless.

While the Pentagon declined to say who was behind the hacking, which led to the shutdown of a computer system serving the office of Defence Secretary Robert Gates, officials told the paper it was China's People's Liberation Army.

"Against the background of good momentum towards the improvement of Sino-US military ties, some people are making groundless accusations that the Chinese military is attacking the networks of the US defence department," Jiang told journalists when asked about the Financial Times report.

The internet is heading for a crash unless it increases its bandwidth capabilities, according to an analyst report.

Stan Schatt, research director at ABI, told Ars Technica: "Uploading bandwidth is going to have to increase, and the cable providers are going to get killed on bandwidth as HD programming becomes more commonplace."

Cisco found that American video websites currently transmit more data per month than the entire amount of traffic sent over the internet in 2000.

Orange revealed in an ASA investigation into adverts for its unlimited broadband service that as of 31 March 2007 only 1.09 percent of customers exceeded the fair usage policy limitation for its service.

Orange said that it logged a breach of fair usage as being more than 40GB in March 2007.

Over the past weeks more and more Comcast users started to notice that their BitTorrent transfers were cut off. Most users report a significant decrease in download speeds, and even worse, they are unable to seed their downloads.

It is reported that Comcast is using an application from Sandvine to throttle BitTorrent traffic. Sandvine breaks every (seed) connection with new peers after a few seconds if it's not a Comcast user.

Although BitTorrent protocol encryption seems to work against most forms of traffic shaping, it doesn't help in this specific case. Setting up a secure connection through VPN or over SSH seems to be the only solution.

One of the ISPs that joined our discussions said: "The fact is, P2P is (from my point of view) a plague - a cancer, that will consume all the bandwidth that I can provide. It's an insatiable appetite.", and another one stated: "P2P applications can cripple a network, they’re like leaches. Just because you pay 49.99 for a 1.5-3.0mbps connection doesn't mean your entitled to use whatever protocols you wish on your ISP's network without them provisioning it to make the network experience good for all users involved."

A website is aiming at blocking Firefox users. This because a fraction of the Firefox users installed an Ad Blocker and are therefor 'stealing money' from website owners that use ads. They recommend using IE, Opera or IE tab. From the site: 'Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers.'

Web search and Internet services company Google Inc. on Friday began selling expanded online storage, targeted for users with large picture, music or video file collections.

The prices range from $20 per year for 6 gigabytes of online storage; $75 per year for 25 gigabytes of storage; $250 per year for 100 gigabytes of storage; and $500 per year for 250 gigabytes of storage.

Google shares fell $2.08 to $512.65 in afternoon trading.

US senators today made a bipartisan call for the universal implementation of filtering and monitoring technologies on the Internet in order to protect children at the end of a Senate hearing for which civil liberties groups were not invited.

Commerce Committee Chairman Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii) and Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee Vice Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) both argued that Internet was a dangerous place where parents alone will not be able to protect their children.

"While filtering and monitoring technologies help parents to screen out offensive content and to monitor their child’s online activities, the use of these technologies is far from universal and may not be fool-proof in keeping kids away from adult material," Sen. Inouye said.

The measures they are calling for include directing the Federal Communications Commission to identify industry practices "that can limit the transmission of child pornography" and requiring the Federal Trade Commission to form a working group to identify blocking and filtering technologies in use and "identify, what, if anything could be done to improve the process and better enable parents to proactively protect their children online."

Internet service provider Cox Communications is reportedly diverting attempts to reach certain online chat channels and redirecting them to a server that attempts to remove spyware from the computer.

Specifically, Cox's DNS server is responding to a domain name request for an Internet Relay Chat server. Instead of responding with the correct IP address for the server, Cox sends the IP address of its own IRC server (70.168.70.4). That server then sends commands to the computer that attempt to remove malware.

Though clever, the tactic is being heavily debated by networking experts on the NANOG mailing list, some of whom question the effectiveness of the technique and who question whether blocking access to the channels for all users (by breaking the DNS protocol) in order to stop some malware is the appropriate solution.