All Philippine government offices have been asked to step up web security after the main information website was targeted by hackers.

A spokesman said:

“We are alerting all government agencies to review and improve security of their websites in view of the hacking of the website this afternoon.”

It is said that best practices will be adopted to reduce vulnerabilities in order to combat cyber crime. The main info site was down for a number of hours and Google had indexed the text ‘hacked by 7z1’ and was showing it up in results pages.

The motives of the hacker were not explained by the Phillipine government.

Anyone visiting the Belvoir Castle website on Friday would have been greeted with a black page bearing the Algerian flag.

The website had been hacked late last week with Arabic text placed instead of the usual content. IT experts have since struggled to repair the homepage although much of the rest of the site had been restored.

A spokesman was baffled as to why they had been targeted.

“It happened on Friday afternoon and we’ve had our IT chap working to try to fix it.

“We’ve nothing to do with Israel or the Middle East, I just help to organise the teddy bears’ picnic.”

An Indian hacker has been released following an order from a magistrate. The man in question, Hari Prasad, had been jailed seven days ago after proving how easy it was to rig an election that made use of electronic voting machines.

The magistrate said that Hari had made a strong statement and served his country well through his actions. The man had demonstrated flaws in electronic voting machines to academics and had been highlighting problems rather than exploiting them. However, police said that he hadn’t been arrested for his demonstration, but for where he had acquired the machine from in the first place.

Cook to Perfection, a Kings Lynn cookship, has had its website brought down by hackers only two months after setting it up. The business was voted ‘best cookshop’ in British retailer awards and its website was specifically mentioned as part of this recognition.

However, the company director, Alastair Done, has found that the website is currently offline.

“I was going to use our website to do some work and it came up with a big error. Somebody’s gone in and deliberately deleted every single file. We have the database – which is good for us – but what we don’t have is the framework that that database goes onto, so it’s as good as useless.”

Goatse Security has been able to grab around 114,000 personal email addresses of iPad buyers from a major telecoms providers website. Some of the email address that have been leaked include White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, New York City Mayer Michael Bloomberg, Diane Sawyer of ABC News, and many CEOs, CFO, and CTO’s.

Some of the email addresses exposed even belonged to DARPA reesarchers and high-ranking military officials. Each iPad comes with an ICC-ID or an “integrated circuit card identifier.” The subscriber’s SIM card and ICC-ID are linked to uniquely identify them. Normally this data would not be publicly accessible.

Apple has just released a new version of the iPhone software, commonly known as iOS. Formerly known as iPhone OS, and the name change is not the only thing that comes packaged with this update.

Apple’s website, there is a list of 64 security holes which have now been fixed in new iOS. The component within the operating system which was the most vulnerable to attacks is WebKit. WebKit is the browser engine which powers safari on iDevices, and was the cause for 50 of the security patches. That’s three quarters of the errors fixed.

In a running saga which has lasted since before Windows XP’s release back in 2001, Microsoft have finally shipped an update for their Windows platform which will allow users to choose the web browser they want to run.

Windows 7 in Europe was due to have the update built in when it was released back in October 2009, but last-minute wranglings between the EU and Microsoft saw the deadline off for another short period. Now users will get the choice which was proposed then – a pop-up box asking whether the user wishes to keep on using Internet Explorer 8 or whether they want to switch to Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera or Apple Safari.

This is the end of part of Microsoft’s problems with antitrust and competition regulators who wanted to see MS’s practice of making Internet Explorer tightly entwined with their operating systems end. Microsoft’s Windows platform has enjoyed a very dominant market position over the last few years, meaning most web users didn’t even know there was a choice of web browser in the first place.

Whether this will help make the web a safer place is still unknown, however.

Google’s new social network, Buzz, has caused a bit of a stir with privacy campaigners recently, with Google admitting they have messed up with their launch strategy.

The concerns centre around the way Buzz integrates with Gmail and other Google services to provide people with a starting network of friends to share content with. Using the user’s e-mail history, it constructs a list of those users e-mailed most often from that account and automatically adds them to their circle of friends. However, this information is then visible to other users, making it possible to see who a particular user is in contact with.

Google stated that since this product had not gone through its “Trusted Tester” program (whereby friends and family of Google staff are used to test products before launch) the issue had not popped up – especially as internal Googlers hadn’t predicted the problem beforehand.

This does leave a bad taste in the mouth as Google collect ever more data on their users. Slip-ups like this should not be happening with a company holding so much private information, especially when they recently criticised the Chinese government for not respecting the privacy of its users.

The Chinese government have certainly been grabbing headlines over the last few years with regards to the internet. Everything from starting their own Chinese-language internet inaccessible from the outside world to trying to hack into Google accounts. Now the government has decided to target hacker websites in order to show how committed they are to stamping out cyber crime. Those Chinese certainly understand irony, don’t they…

The latest news comes about a site which apparently had hundreds of thousands of registered users, with over ten thousand of those signing up for paid accounts which supposedly granted them access to hacking software. Needless to say this site has now been shut down and its owners thrown in a dark cell (well, probably).

Apparently this one was the largest “hacker training” website in China, and had earned over $1m in membership fees for its owners. The move to shut it down could be tied to the Google fiasco, saving face for a government increasingly seen as a meddling force in the future of the internet.

Microsoft, kings of buggy software, have just patched a bug in their Windows operating systems which was discovered by a Google techie – except this one was almost old enough to drink legally.

The 17 year old bug is in the NTVDM piece of software, responsible for allowing old MS-DOS based programs to function in the Windows NT, XP, Vista and 7 lines of OSes produced by Microsoft.

Why this bug has taken so long to locate, and whether it is a genuine security risk these days is a mystery, only that it has indeed existed since Windows NT 3.1 and is still present in the most modern versions of Windows.

Now I’m no Microsoft basher, but surely it should have been detected by someone inside their organisation long before now, not some Google security analyst in 2010?