According to Hitwise reports, Bing currently accounts for roughly a third of the search engine market. Surprised? Raking in 30.01% of all US searches, Bing has made some significant strides from last month’s overall share of 28.48%. Google on the other hand has fallen back a few steps from 66.69% market share to 64.42%. Here’s more »

The online eyewear retailer who bragged about his scheme to manipulate Google’s ranking system by creating negative publicity about himself has been arrested. , Vitaly Borker was arrested at his Brooklyn home and charged with fraud, cyberstalking and harassment. He faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted. Borker sent customers broken or counterfeit more »

A law professor at Santa Clara University in California is accusing Google of an “impermissible conflict of interest” in regards to its practice of bidding in Adwords auctions in order to place ads for their own products and services. These are known as house ads. Eric Goldman says the practice distorts ad value and just more »

This week’s column is all about the scourge of scareware. Most of us have seen it at one time or another as we surf the web. A pop up will suddenly appear with dire warnings that your system is infected or critical errors were found in your registry. Clicking on it brings up a site for a program that claims it can fix everything-for a fee. The price ranges from $29.95 to $50. Once you pay and download the program, sure enough it does a scan, finds the problems and fixes them all. What a relief, right? Not really. You never had any infections or errors at all. The only thing that got cleaned out was your wallet. A scammer just succeeded in scaring some cash from you.

That’s right. The whole concept of scareware is actually pretty simple. Just trick someone into thinking they have critical issues with their computer and need your program to fix it. It’s big business for cybercriminals.

Finjan, a well known web security firm, has released data regarding rogueware from its Malicious Code Research Center. According to the report, the firm was able to gather data about a rogueware affiliate network, where members make an astounding $10,800 per day. In order to get traffic, the criminals use SEO techniques. The sites employ more »

Trend Micro is reporting that within hours of the news that popular actor Heath Ledger had been found dead in his New York apartment, several malware sites appeared at the top of search listings for the words “heath” and “ledger”. Users visiting these sites are redirected to another site, which prompts them to download an more »