Researchers on Tuesday said they have proof the Stuxnet worm used to cripple Iran’s nuclear program has been in the wild two years longer than first believed. There’s also now evidence the military-grade malware’s origins date back to 2005, and possibly earlier.
The entertainment industry is teaming with five major Internet service providers to this week launch a new Copyright Alert System that will first warn online pirates and then start to strangle bandwidth of repeat offenders.Dubbed “Six Strikes,” the new system began roll out Monday, putting consumers on notice that content owners would be monitoring for illegal downloading or uploading of copyrighted movies, music and televsion shows and notifying participating ISPs such actvitity is detected.
Various news outlets reported late Friday that Microsoft’s public cloud storage service suffered a global outage due to a lapsed security certificate.Beginning around 4 p.m. EST, developers and other Azure customers began being blocked from accessing files.
A study released Wednesday shows one in four consumers who receive a data breach letter become the victim of identity fraud. That statistic represented 12.6 million victims last year — one million more than the year before, according to the 2013 Identity Fraud Report released by Javelin Strategy & Research.
A non-profit association for IT professionals in higher education announced Tuesday its server had been breached.Educause, which has 1,800 college and 300 corporate members, issued a warning that it had discovered a security breach sometime in February that may have compromised the hashed passwords of .edu domain holders and urged impacted administrative, billing or technical contacts to change their passwords.
A former Minnesota state employee was charged Thursday with misdemeanors for allegedly accessing thousands of driver’s licenses during a four-year period and storing 172 of them in an encrypted file. Ninety percent of victims in the data breach were women.John A. Hunt, 48, of Woodbury, Minn., faces six misdemeanors, including misconduct by a public employee and unauthorized computer access. He is accused of illegally querying the state Driver and Vehicle Services database more than 19,000 times between 2008 and last October. If convicted, he could receive up to a year in jail and $3,000 in fines.
Two days after the group Anonymous boasted it had broken into a government Web site and had the data dump to prove it, the U.S. Federal Reserve admitted it was hacked.”The Federal Reserve system is aware that information was obtained by exploiting a temporary vulnerability in a website vendor product,” a spokeswoman told Reuters Tuesday. “Exposure was fixed shortly after discovery and is no longer an issue. This incident did not affect critical operations of the Federal Reserve system.”
Researchers at FireEye’s Malware Intelligence Lab say they’ve found malware that attempts to evade detection with extended sleep calls and uses “the fast flux technique” to hide the attacker’s identity.
Google Chrome users, among others, couldn’t access some of the most popular Web sites Monday after an advertising network’s corporate Web site was injected with malware. But, according to the ad company’s chief executive, those sites were safe.Those who called up sites such as The Huffington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and many other media sites, among others, were greeted with a warning that the sites contained malware.
Researchers at Australia-based BitDefender say they’ve found how some Yahoo Mail accounts are being hijacked, and it leads back to “buggy” blog software Yahoo’s developers used.
Infosec Insider content is written by a trusted community of Threatpost cybersecurity subject matter experts. Each contribution has a goal of bringing a unique voice to important cybersecurity topics. Content strives to be of the highest quality, objective and non-commercial.
Sponsored Content is paid for by an advertiser. Sponsored content is written and edited by members of our sponsor community. This content creates an opportunity for a sponsor to provide insight and commentary from their point-of-view directly to the Threatpost audience. The Threatpost editorial team does not participate in the writing or editing of Sponsored Content.
