Chris Brook

A South Carolina man was arrested yesterday on charges stemming from a data breach that may have leaked personal information on more than 200,000 Medicaid beneficiaries in the state, including their names, phone numbers, addresses, birth dates and Medicare ID numbers according to a report in the newspaper The State.

Malware writers are taking advantage of the popularity of the Instagram photo application to distribute a form of malware that can send background SMS texts from Android devices.

The number of Macs infected with the Flashback malware continue to decline but it’s not entirely clear to what degree. Initial numbers estimated that there were about 600,000 infected computers in total yet those numbers dropped last week to 237,000 and now, according to research by Symantec published last night, remained around the 140,000 mark this week.

Estimates of the extent of cyber crime are hopelessly overblown, two computer security researchers argue in an editorial from Sunday’s New York Times.

If you’re worried that your conversations are being monitored, old fashioned “coded talk” also works to disguise the meaning of your conversations. Asking “how are the kids?” rather than “how’s the progress on our new chip design?” may be enough to throw attackers off the scent.

(Images via perspective‘s Flickr photostream)

Don’t ignore physical security. Morehouse said he knows of many executives and foreign travelers who have returned to their hotel room to find it trashed and mobile devices missing. Once criminals have physical control of your device, protecting its contents is a much bigger challenge. 

(Images via blmurch‘s and chokingsun‘s Flickr photostream)

The pace of change in mobile spying applications is rapid. However, when it comes to intercepting phone calls in the field, phones that use the older 2G mobile communications standard are easier to crack. Often, organizations that want to carry out an attack will force a mobile device from 3G into 2G only mode. Researchers have already demonstrated, publicly, that the A5/1 algorithm that protects 2G communications can be broken and communications decrypted in real time. Of course, depending on your destination, 3G wireless may not be an option to begin with.