Chris Brook

Over a million user IDs and e-mail addresses of job applicants were taken from the Washington Post’s Web site after being hacked late last week, according to a statement posted on the Post’s Web site.

Retail brokerage Morgan Stanley Smith Barney (MSSB) has notified 34,000 investment clients that some of their data has been lost, including their names, addresses, social security numbers, tax identification numbers and investment income from 2010, according to a report on the Dow Jones newswires.

Spammers have been exploiting anonymous URL shortening services for a while now but according to a post on Symantec’s MessageLabs Intelligence Blog, some have been using the technique as part of a large malware attack.

Byzantine
Hades is a code name given to a wide ranging and persistent  group of network intrusions into U.S.
military, government, and corporate systems.

As lore and Bradley Manning’s
own accounts have it, the one-time Intelligence analyst and recently demoted
Pfc. walked into a forward operating base near Baghdad with a blank disc that
he had cleverly disguised as a Lady Gaga CD and proceeded to download a
treasure trove of diplomatic cables of varying levels of classification.

Hacks
against the Defense Department and other U.S. agencies stretching back to 2003
were codenamed Titan Rain by investigators. The attacks, which breached
hundreds of networks, including Departments of State, Energy and Homeland
Security, were coordinated from Chinese computers, investigators found.

The
Department of Defense’s costliest weapons program ever was allegedly no match
for hackers as spies broke into the Pentagon’s $300 billion Joint Strike
Fighter (JSF) project in 2007. Details continue to be scarce to this day but
former U.S. officials claim the attacks can be traced back to China, a claim
China’s Foreign Ministry immediately refuted.