Stories about: AOL

Who is the real identity behind that Gmail account? While finding out may not be as easy as knowing who is behind chunkylover53@aol.com (Homer Simpson, for the curious), it apparently isn't much harder.

Spoofers, spammers and phishers, beware. There's a new gun in town, and some of the Internet's most powerful companies -- including Yahoo, Google, PayPal and AOL -- are brandishing it in the ongoing battle against e-mail fraud.

Yahoo appears close to implementing OpenID, a Web authentication standard that relieves people of the need to remember multiple passwords to log into different Web sites.

Federated identity has long been a goal of many IT organizations. One look at the promise of federation, and it is easy to see why. After all, empowering one organization to serve as an identity provider for another frees IT from having to manage the identities of partnering organizations' employees and customers, thereby facilitating the pursuit of competitive-advantage projects. In this era of increasing enterprise decentralization, thanks in large part to the Web, establishing a federated identity framework is fast proving as essential as it is hard to pull off.

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) is supplying online banking customers with free PC security in a bid to mitigate online fraud.

Paypal security chief Michael Barrett isn't ready to claim a victory in the fight against phishing schemes, but he said that his company is slowly turning the tide using a set of new partnerships and technological means.

High-tech consumer products and services of all kinds are making their way into the workplace. They include everything from smart phones, voice-over-IP systems and flash memory sticks to virtual online worlds. And as people grow more accustomed to having their own personal technology at their beck and call -- and in fact can't imagine functioning without it -- the line between what they use for work and what they use for recreation is blurring.

In the month of August to date, there have been 38 malicious-code attacks on instant-messaging networks, double the number experienced in July.

A 23-year-old man who Wednesday pleaded guilty to federal charges for his role in a phishing scam that targeted AOL users now faces up to seven years in prison.

It's a good time to be a malicious hacker. That's because even though it's not a time of revolutionary new techniques in hacking for profit, business is booming for the established methods. Despite increased investment in information security defenses, the good guys continue to lag badly behind. According to one report by Sophos, which called the recent uptick in ­malware a "deluge," by April 2007, more than 250,000 websites were hosting malicious code and more than 8,000 were being added to that total every day.

A unique demonstration showed user-centric identity software from major vendors, start-ups, one-woman projects and open source hackers all working in concert to replace passwords with validated identity-card access to Web-based resources.