Artists Against 419 targets web sites it has connected with advance fee (419) scams involving international money transfers. The group uses web applications and organized "flashmobs" of web users to target sites that remain online after hosting firms and law enforcement have been contacted.

When the Mugu Marauder was launched on Feb. 7, Netcraft began monitoring five sites on the list of target URLs published by Artists Against 419. Four of the five are now offline, with crownsecuritiesandfinance.com (removed from DNS) and www.firstglobaltrust.com (account terminated by web host) shutting down within days. Three sites housed at Chinese hosts lasted longer. Abbeytrustonline.com and bancoplatinum-online.com, housed at fz.fj.cn, became inaccessible last week. Swissroyallbank.com remains available on the Fujian Province Network, and continues on the Muru Marauder target list.

The development teams for Firefox and Opera have updated the browsers to address URL spoofing using Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), allowing users to visit IDN domains but be protected from phishing attacks. The attacks do not affect Microsoft's Internet Explorer, the most widely-used web browser, which does not support IDN names.

Firefox 1.0.1 will display IDNs as punycode in the browser's address bar, allowing users to detect phishing attacks using potentially deceptive uses of IDNs. The new approach can be seen on the original demo demonstrated by the Shmoo Group, which uses a Unicode link to display www.theshmoogroup.com in the status bar of affected browsers, but sent users to www.xn--theshmogroup-bgk.com. The status bar now displays the unspoofed URL:

"One of the potential exploits addressed in this release could be serious in certain situations and thus we urge all users to upgrade to this release as soon as possible," the phpBB Group said in its advisory. The security fixes address multiple bugs that disclose the full path to system files in phpBB, which is powered by the PHP server-side scripting language. A vulnerability reported by iDefense could, under some configurations, allow malicious users to view system files.

"At about 14:15 PST some circuit breakers were tripped in the colocation facility where our servers are housed," WikiPedia reported in a message to users. "Although the facility has a well-stocked generator, this took out power to places inside the facility, including the switch that connects us to the network and all our servers. The sticky point is the database servers, where all the important stuff is."

Internet marketing firm Marchex Inc. has finalized a deal to pay a whopping $164.2 million for Name Development Ltd., which displays keyword advertising across a portfolio of more than 100,000 domains. The deal, along with the recent sale of a misspelled domain name for $112,000, offers evidence that mistyped URLs and other "accidental traffic" have become big business.

The pricetag on the sale of Name Development is more than the $155 million paid by SAVVIS Communications to acquire Cable & Wireless America, and nearly as much as the $176 million Freenet paid for the hosting operations of Germany's Tect AG. SAVVIS gained about 350K hostnames in the C&W deal, while Freenet acquired 2.2 million hostnames from Tect.