Paul Roberts

Restaurant Depot Admits They Were Hacked, Customer Data Stolen

A hack has the Restaurant wholesale chain Restaurant Depot in hot water, after thieves compromised the firm’s credit card processing systems and made off with customer information, including credit card numbers. One published report claims as many as 100,000 individuals may have been victims of the breach.


A class action lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in California against Hewlett-Packard could have wide ranging implications for software makers, should the court agree with the plaintiff’s claim that the company violated the state’s consumer protection laws by failing to disclose a serious vulnerability in the software that runs some of its printers. 

The controversy over stealthy monitoring software by CarrierIQ has raised important questions about user privacy and business ethics in the Brave New World of smart phones, tablets and the like. In the uproar over CarrierIQ’s surreptitious monitoring of mobile phone users, various tools have appeared that claim to be able to detect the software. However – removing CarrierIQ from your phone is another matter entirely. And,while some sites have offered instructions on doing so, Kaspersky Lab researcher Tim Armstrong said that, for all but a few mobile phone hardware experts, doing a CarrierIQ-pendectomy is a bad idea. 

You only have to glance at the headlines to know that the state of computer application security is bad. But a new report from Veracode makes clear how bad: just 16 percent of almost 10,000 applications tested in the last six months received a passing security grade on their first attempt.