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"Distrust and caution are the parents of security" - Benjamin Franklin
Few things sent shockwaves to all corners of the security community like news in March that RSA’s popular SecurID two-factor authentication tokens had been rendered all but useless by a small but cleverly targeted phishing campaign that included a payload of a malicious Flash object embedded in an Excel file.
Not even a techno-religion is immune from security snafus, as the folks at Apple are steadily discovering. After years of watching the bad guys use crimeware kits like Zeus against Microsoft, the iGang finally got a malware construction tool to call its own in May of this year.
A flurry of attacks on open source servers, operating systems and software also permeated the headlines this year, with a compromise of the repository for the Linux source code leading the way.
Sony’s online gaming platform, The PlayStation Network (PSN), disappeared for more than a month starting in April, and no amount of double X and O-ing or right joysticking could save it. The reason? A massive attack on PSN’s network knocked the gaming giant offline and exposed the data of more than million users worldwide.
After a decade of flourishing unseen in the shadows of the Internet, Anonymous, LulzSec and other like-minded groups expanded their activities from obscure attacks and protests to full fledged hacking and DDoS campaigns against governments, The Church of Scientology, Visa, Paypal, Sony and a wide range of other private and public organizations perceived as hostile to the hackers’ ever shifting li
Stuxnet debuted with a frenzy in 2010 after researchers exposed the malware already busily disrupting Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. That was followed this past year by continued speculation, finger pointing and even some dismissive attitudes about the worm, which targets Siemens-made industrial control devices.
We’ve compiled our list of the Top Security Stories of 2011, presented here in no particular order. These are the issues that shook the world’s markets and kept us awake at night. If there’s a lesson here, it’s that cybersecurity challenges aren’t going away anytime soon. In fact, as we look forward to 2012, about the only thing that could quell the continuing battle to secure the technology system is if the Mayans turn out to be right.
Executives for some of the world’s largest oil companies stressed that cyber attacks against their companies are becoming more strategic and happening more frequently at a conference last week, according to a report today from the BBC.
The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released a new report yesterday that details plans to complement the nation’s existing cybersecurity policy, according to a blog entry on the office’s site co-authored by U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra and Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt.
Customers of the online poker Website Ultimate Bet (UB) are the victims of a data breach that spilled the private information of up to 3.5 million of its customers online over the weekend.
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