Facebook offers bounty for bugs

Facebook has spent $40 000 in the first 21 days of a programme that rewards the discovery of security bugs, reports the BBC.

The bug bounty programme aims to encourage security researchers to help harden Facebook against attack.

One security researcher has been rewarded with more than $7 000 for finding six serious bugs in the social networking site.

The WikiLeaks Web site crashed on Tuesday in an apparent cyber attack after the accelerated publication of tens of thousands of once-secret state department cables by the anti-secrecy organisation raised new concerns about the exposure of confidential US embassy sources, writes the Associated Press.

“WikiLeaks.org is presently under attack,” the group said on Twitter late on Tuesday. One hour later, the site and the cables posted there were inaccessible.

WikiLeaks updated its Twitter account to say it was “still under a cyber attack” and directed followers to search for cables on a mirror site or a separate search system, cablegatesearch.net.

The community discussion part of Nokia's developers' forum Web site has been hacked, and members' e-mail addresses accessed, according to the mobile phone manufacturer, says Computing.co.uk.

The discussion part of the Web site has been taken down and replaced by a message from Nokia explaining what happened and apologising to its members.

“During our ongoing investigation of the incident, we have discovered that a database table containing developer forum members' e-mail addresses has been accessed, by exploiting a vulnerability in the bulletin board software that allowed an SQL injection attack.”

A newly unearthed memo posted on WikiLeaks details Apple's burgeoning efforts to combat counterfeit goods in China and elsewhere, something the document says the electronics giant began in earnest just three years ago, notes Cnet.

The unclassified memo, picked up by CNN's Mark Millian yesterday, originates from the US embassy in Beijing and is dated September 2008.

In it, the embassy provides an update on Apple's plans to deal with the growing number of counterfeit versions of its products in the region, including hiring former Pfizer employees Don Shruhan and John Theriault to manage the company's security.