Stories about: DOJ

The former owner of two Illinois technology companies was sentenced Thursday to serve 30 months in prison for participating in a conspiracy to defraud a U.S. Federal Communications Commission program to help schools and libraries in poor areas connect to the Internet, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

The founder of several Muslim jihad websites has pleaded guilty to three charges related to making online threats, including threatening the writers of the television show "South Park," the U.S. Department of Justice said.

The Department of Justice today said a man who sent malicious code to Marriott International Corporation, threatening to reveal confidential information taken from the company's computers if Marriott did not offer him a job, has been sent to prison for his criminal endeavor.

Verizon's spectrum deal with several cable companies could soon come under the same government scrutiny that AT&T received during its attempted merger with T-Mobile.

The Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Justice teamed up for a coast-to-coast crackdown on identity thieves this week.

It was another busy week for hactivists attacking the online targets of their ire. This time, hackers under the banner AntiSec appeared to have hacked the website of OnGuardOnline.gov, the U.S. government's online security website, in protest against the much-railed-against legislation Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) as well as other bills regarding intellectual protection. Similarly, the group Anonymous is believed to be behind the distributed denial-of-service attack on Thursday that brought down the European Parliament's website in what is thought to be retaliation for European support for the shutdown of the Megaupload file-sharing site the week before. Anonymous also opposes a treaty being ratified in Europe now called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. That deals with infringement of intellectual property rights.

Following last week's Backspin, reader Alex Gonzales (Sweetwater, Texas) wrote to me: "Just read your SOPA article and I guess I'm just not seeing the big picture. If the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) could put an end to online piracy and stop a lot of those damn viruses, maybe even stop hackers -- what's bad about that? You say bad for business, bad for Internet -- but how? How is stopping/policing the bad stuff on the Internet bad? Give me some real reasons as to why [SOPA/PIPA] is bad. And don't tell me to go read the SOPA/PIPA bills in their entirety."

Hackers under the AntiSec banner appeared to have hacked late Monday the website of OnGuardOnline.gov, the U.S. federal government's online security website, in protest against controversial legislation.

Sourcefire today announced anti-malware software for Windows-based devices that combines signature- and behavior-based detection methods to identify malicious code trying to invade the enterprise network, tracking it down through cloud-based analysis.

For Internet activists, last week's Web protests against two controversial copyright enforcement bills were a huge victory against three powerful and well-funded trade groups that pushed hard for passage of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act.