Donald Sears

Notre Dame Data Breach Number at 24K

Notre Dame University, who originally discovered a data breach back in early November 2009, said 24,000 NDU employees were affected. Read the full article. [The Observer]

TJX Hacker to Enter Guilty Plea for Heartland

Admitted TJX intruder Albert Gonzalez has entered into a plea agreement
on charges that he hacked into Heartland Payment Systems, Hannaford
Brothers, 7-Eleven and two other unnamed national retailers. Read the full article. [Wired]


An electronics testing firm in Louisiana is suing its bank, Capital One,
alleging that the financial institution was negligent when it failed to
stop hackers from transferring nearly $100,000 out of its account
earlier this year. Read the full article. [Washington Post] 

Microsoft dismissed recently-disclosed threats to its BitLocker
disk-encryption technology as “relatively low risk,” noting that
attackers must not only have physical access to a targeted PC, but must
manipulate the machine two separate times. Read the full article. [Computerworld]

Compromised (zombie) machines accounted for more than four in five
(83.4 per cent) of an estimated global volume of 107 billion junk mail
messages sent out every day during 2009. Read the full article. [The Register]

The Cisco Cybercrime Return on Investment Matrix identifies the
innovative and lucrative banking Trojan Zeus, as well as successful Web exploits that have dominated cybercrime as
“rising stars.” Read the full article. [TechTarget]

Citing a rising tide of complaints from people
who unknowingly bought counterfeit software infected with malware,
Microsoft announced the launch of educational initiatives
and enforcement actions in over 70 countries to raise awareness of
counterfeit software and to protect consumers. Read the full article. [Dark Reading]