Egyptian Blogger Sentenced to 15 Years

Alaa Abd El Fattah, a prominent blogger, known as a key figure in the local 2011 uprising, has recently been sentenced to 15 years in jail for arranging a demonstration on the Internet. The blogger had been arrested by each of Egypt’s 5 leaders since Mubarak. Abd El Fattah was one of the activists who are most associated with the 2011 uprising in Egypt, which briefly ended 60 years of autocratic rule. Now the blogger was sentenced to 15 years in jail for allegedly arranging a protest online.

Digital News in UK Are Read on Mobiles

UK citizens seem to be abandoning PCs as their main method to access news, switching to updates on various mobile devices. According to the research carried out by Oxford University’s Reuters Institute, the proportion of readers who mostly rely on a desktop PC to get news on the Internet has fallen by 23 percentage points over the year and totaled to 57%.

Cybercrime Damages Estimated

The Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has published the cost for cybercrime all over the world. Of course, the numbers were released in billions, because the outfit set their own overestimated value on the costs of “damage to business from the IP theft”. In result, the final cost of hacking totaled to $445 bln. In the meanwhile, a bit more reasonable figure is the estimated $160 bln loss to individuals from hacking.

Tweetdeck Vulnerability Was Caused by Emoji Heart

The most popular microblog has finally relaunched its application for social media professionals after it was shut down due to discovery of a vulnerability leaving users open to attack. A few days ago, one of the Twitter users trying to code an emoji heart inadvertently revealed a vulnerability which resulted in Twitter being forced to shut down its Tweetdeck app. Now Tweetdeck has been reopened after verifying its security fix, but a number of users keep reporting problems because of caching of the web-based client.

US Accused Russian Hacker of $100m Fraud

Evgeniy Bogachev, a Russian computer hacker, was accused a few days ago of organizing a worldwide conspiracy which targeted hundreds of thousands of PCs with malware, thus enabling him and his gang to steal over $100 million from US business and banks.