"Game of Thrones," the wildly popular fantasy drama on HBO, has set an all-time record via BitTorrent, according to data collected by Torrent Freak.

The site, which tracks the world of BitTorrent and piracy, was tracking uploads and downloads of the first episode of the latest season of "Game of Thrones." It found that just a few hours after the first torrent was shared on the site, 163,088 people were sharing just one torrent. The so-called "swarm" of people sharing the torrent outpaced the previous titleholder, "Heroes," which had 144,663 peers sharing one torrent. According to TorrentFreak, another 110,303 people were sharing a complete copy of the "Game of Thrones" episode, and 52,786 people were downloading.

TorrentFreak now believes that just two days since the episode aired, over one million downloads have been tallied.

Mark Zuckerberg in Russia.

(Credit: Facebook)

The Russian government has turned to censorship on the Web.

According to the New York Times, the government is utilizing a new law, which the Russian parliament approved in July and which took effect in November, that allows the government to selectively censor Web pages within its borders because of content that it believes is illegal or harmful to children. The law's supporters have said that it protects against child pornography and other harmful content, but detractors say that it's giving the government too much power to block whatever it deems unfit for its citizens.

(Credit: Apple/CNET)

Apple's nearly year-and-a-half old iMessage service has been found to be vulnerable to an attack that uses a flood of messages, or messages so long that the application is rendered unstable.

According to a report from The Next Web, a small group of developers have found themselves the target of an attack that does one of those things -- sending what could be thousands of messages.

The source is suspected to be someone with involvement in pirated iOS software, who could have gotten some basic information needed to send another user a message through Apple's messaging service, The Next Web says. That same individual (or group of individuals) is also said to be using throwaway e-mail accounts, making it difficult to trace it back or block future attacks.

Reports from Internet monitoring services show that recent news of a cyber attack so big that it made the Internet slow to a crawl around the world was a bit dramatic.

The New York Times reported about spam-fighting nonprofit Spamhaus and a distributed-denial-of-service attack on the Dutch group's site that became the "largest computer attacks on the Internet" and caused a "widespread congestion and jamming crucial infrastructure around the world."

Matthew Prince, the CEO of CloudFlare, the company enlisted to fight the attacks for Spamhaus, told CNET today that the attacks -- which ceased yesterday morning -- were so big, they caused outages for the London and Hong Kong Internet exchanges. These exchanges are the meeting point for multiple networks. Before the Times report, CloudFlare put out a blog post titled, "The DDoS that almost broke the Internet."

A cyberwar is under way between two companies over a recent move made by one.

Spam-fighting organization, Spamhaus, which works with e-mail providers around the globe to block spam from entering in-boxes, has been in a battle over the last week that has seen distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks exceed by several times the typical attacks inflicted on organizations.

Spamhaus hosts a blacklist made up of servers that, it believes, are designed to send spam around the world. Recently, the organization added a Dutch Web hosting company named Cyberbunker to its blacklist. Cyberbunker, which gets its name from its headquarters in a former NATO bunker and allows its customers to maintain their anonymity, has built its business on accepting any and all customers, except those engaged in child pornography and terrorism-related activities.

A cyberwar is under way between two companies over a recent move made by one.

Spam-fighting organization, Spamhaus, which works with e-mail providers around the globe to block spam from entering in-boxes, has been in a battle over the last week that has seen distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks exceed by several times the typical attacks inflicted on organizations.

Spamhaus hosts a blacklist made up of servers that, it believes, are designed to send spam around the world. Recently, the organization added a Dutch Web hosting company named Cyberbunker to its blacklist. Cyberbunker, which gets its name from its headquarters in a former NATO bunker and allows its customers to maintain their anonymity, has built its business on accepting any and all customers, except those engaged in child pornography and terrorism-related activities.

Wells Fargo was the target of another distributed denial-of-service attack.

The bank's Web site was slowed down by the attack yesterday, affecting a certain number of customers, according to Fox Business News.

"Yesterday we saw an unusually high volume of Web site traffic which we believe was a denial of service attack," a Wells Fargo spokeswoman told CNET today. "The vast majority of customers were not impacted and customer information is safe. For customers who had difficulty accessing the site, we encouraged them to call us by phone, use ATMs or try logging on again as the disruption is usually intermittent. We apologize to our customers for any inconvenience during that time."

A new Websense report suggests that approximately 94 percent of endpoints that run Oracle's Java are vulnerable to at least one exploit, and we are ignoring updates at our own peril. 

According to security researchers at Websense, it's not just zero-day attacks that remain a persistent threat. Instead, Java exploits are now a popular tool for cybercriminals.

With so many vulnerabilities, keeping browsers up-to-date can become an issue -- especially as Java has to be updated independently from our preferred browser, and a mobile, cross-browser workforce is difficult to manage securely. Keeping this in mind, the security team used their Advanced Classification Engine (ACE) and ThreatSeeker Network to both detect and analyze in real-time which versions of Java are currently in use across "tens of millions" of endpoints.

The People's Liberation Army unit (PLA) allegedly responsible for cyberspying on Western targets has collaborated with a top Chinese university on networking and security research papers.

In a finding uncovered by Reuters, Shanghai Jiaotong's School of Information Security Engineering (SISE) and the People's Liberation Army Unit 61398 have worked in partnership on at least three papers in recent years. PLA Unit 61398 is well-known for its alleged links to cyberattacks on the West, after a report was released by security firm Mandiant which stated that an "overwhelming" number of cyberattacks originate from the single unit in Shanghai.

The co-authors of these papers, including research on attack detection and computer security, come from both SISE and PLA Unit 61398. In one paper from 2007, PLA researcher Chen Yi-qun worked with Xue Zhi, who has been credited with developing China's leading cyberattack platform, according to the school's Web site.

Apple's two-step verification process, introduced Thursday.

(Credit: Jason Cipriani/CNET)

Apple has fixed the security issue involving its Apple ID password-reset page, a vulnerability that had made it possible for hackers with a user's e-mail address and birth date to reset the user's password.

Apple said yesterday that it was aware of the issue and was preparing a fix. Meanwhile, the company had taken the "iForgot" reset page offline for maintenance. Now the page is back up, and Apple has confirmed the fix with CNET.