Microsoft has warned customers that their financial data such as credit card information may have been compromised by hackers who attacked the company's online store in India earlier this month.The company had earlier described the hack, in which user names and passwords had been leaked, as a "limited compromise". The site which is run by a third-party service provider has been criticized for bad security practices, such as saving data in plain text.The store, which was defaced by hackers who claimed to be Chinese, is still unavailable. The hackers also released images of what appeared to be lists of users' names and passwords."Upon further detailed investigation of the third-party service provider managing Microsoft Store India, Microsoft has determined that financial information may have been exposed for some online store customers," the company said in a statement on Tuesday. "We have notified all potentially impacted customers and have provided additional guidance and resources to help protect their accounts," it added.India has long-standing border disputes with China and Pakistan, and the friction is reflected on social networks, and in hacks of websites on both sides of the borders, including a high-profile hack of the website of India's Central Bureau of Investigation. More...

Cloud technology is emerging as a viable option for companies that want to cut costs, increase agility or augment their own IT resources without building out new infrastructure -- or all of the above. But deciding which type of service is the best fit for your specific needs and ensuring the new cloud offerings play nice with your existing application mix is a challenge, to say the least.More companies are running head-on into these challenges nonetheless. A study published last year by PricewaterhouseCoopers found that 41 percent of security and IT respondents said their organizations have already implemented cloud computing, most going with SaaS offerings.To plot your cloud strategy, analysts and other experts say you should start by looking at your own needs, then work outward to see how cloud platforms, products and vendors can help. Pay heed to fundamentals -- the why, what, and how of your own situation -- by following a 3-step process:Assess your needs and goals
Set your application strategy, Identify challenges
Then you'll be better prepared to see how well today's industry offerings match up.Assess Needs and GoalsWhy do you want to make a move? Cutting or conserving costs is an obvious starting point." More...

A new era in Web site naming has begun, providing a golden opportunity for savvy IT professionals to go on the offensive with new domains that can capture additional Web traffic and generate new revenue.Under today's rules, names are available in 280 well-known categories, such as .com, .gov or country codes, like .de for Germany. Under the new rules, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is accepting (between now and April 12) applications for new generic top-level domains (gTLDs), possibly as many as 1,000. Examples of possible new domains are: cities and regions (.paris), domains tied to specific interests (.music) or domains tied to companies and brands (.motorola).New era for Web site names beginsAccording to Jeremiah Johnston, general counsel at domain name re-seller Sedo.com, "Savvy network administrators can demonstrate added value to their company because they know how to have ancillary domain names forward captured traffic to the primary domain name and how to track that traffic. When the company then sees thousands of people coming to these other domains who are then forwarded to pages where they can actually take an action that generates revenue for the company, the company sees the profit in this remarkably underleveraged strategy." More...