European police team to take on IS social media propaganda

By Michael Holden LONDON (Reuters) – A Europe-wide police unit is to be set up next month with the aim of shutting down social media accounts used by key Islamic State (IS) militants to spread propaganda and recruit foreigners to their cause, Europol said on Monday. The small police team will scour the internet and try to take down accounts of IS ringleaders within hours of being detected, in a bid to dent a propaganda machine which is reckoned to send out about 100,000 tweets a day.

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Facebook gaining ground on YouTube in video ads, report says

By Eric Auchard and Leila Abboud FRANKFURT/PARIS (Reuters) – Facebook is gaining ground on Google's YouTube as an outlet for big companies to market their products via online videos, the fastest growing category of Internet ads, a report published on Monday said. The competition for video viewers opens up a new front in the clash between the two web giants that already compete in other types of advertising given their appeal to young and international consumers, Ampere Analysis said in a study.

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Internet advertising to drive global ad spend: Zenith

Surging growth in advertising via mobile phones and tablet computers will help Internet advertising overtake television as the dominant medium for global ad spending by 2017, a leading media buyer forecasts. Zenith Optimedia, owned by advertising agency Publicis, said on Monday that it expects mobile advertising – via smartphones, iPads and other tablet computers – to more than double its share of global ad spending between 2014 and 2017, to 12.9 percent.

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Hackers ground 1,400 passengers at Warsaw Airport

Around 1,400 passengers of the Polish airline LOT were grounded at Warsaw's Chopin airport on Sunday after hackers attacked the airline ground computer systems used to issue flight plans, the company said. The computer system was hacked in the afternoon and fixed after around five hours, during which 10 of the state-owned carrier's national and international flights were canceled and about a dozen more delayed, spokesman Adrian Kubicki said

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Europol Director: hackers target banks, not customers

By Toby Sterling THE HAGUE (Reuters) – Banks, rather than their customers, are increasingly the main target of online thieves, Europol director Rob Wainwright said on Friday in an interview. “That has been an important change,” Wainwright told Reuters after a conference on cyber security in The Hague.

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U.S., European police break up network of 12,000 computers taken over by criminals

Law enforcement agencies in Europe and the United States have dismantled a network comprising at least 12,000 in computers that had been taken over by criminals, Europol said on Thursday. The software used to infect the computers was “very sophisticated” but the network was relatively small compared to others uncovered in the past, Europol said in a statement. Those behind the network or “botnet” infected computers with the software and may then have sold to others the right to install further malicious programs, said Paul Gillen, the head of operations at Europol’s Cybercrime Centre.

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Hackers controlling millions of PCs disrupted in Europol sweep

By Anthony Deutsch and Jim Finkle AMSTERDAM/BOSTON (Reuters) – A cybercrime operation that stole banking information by hacking more than 3 million computers in Indonesia, India and other countries has been disrupted by European police with assistance from three technology companies, officials said on Wednesday. Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre coordinated the operation out of its headquarters in The Hague, targeting the so-called Ramnit botnet, a network of computers infected with malware

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