The official line in Washington D.C. is that there’s a new Cold War brewing, with an ascendant China in the place of the old Soviet Union, and cyberspace as the new theater of war. But work done by an independent security researcher suggests that the Chinese government is woefully unprepared to fend off cyber attacks on its own infrastructure.
Sony admitted that hackers broke into its PlayStation Network online gaming network made off with the personal information of more than 77 million members in what would be one of the largest reported data breaches in history.
Documents spilled into public by the political unrest in Egypt in recent months has shone a spotlight on the shadowy world of for-profit, custom malware creation for governments around the world.
Data leaked from lost, stolen or recycled IT equipment is a major, major issue. News reports about the reams of data that can be retrieved from the hard drives and memory of second hand PCs are nothing new. Organizations like the IEEE have been calling attention to the insecure storage of data for more than a decade. Enterprising reporters have subsequently found that all kinds of devices – from discarded cell phones to printers and scanners – might continue to carry.
A 26 year-old Georgia man pleaded guilty in federal court in Virginia to the theft of hundreds of thousands of credit cards and a years-long fraud scheme that netted him more than $100,000 in illicit profits – money he used to buy himself a BMW and luxury clothing.
A U.S. security expert has uncovered data on more than 10,000 job applicants for positions with China’s State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs, including user names and passwords that could be used to gain access to other sensitive government systems.
Adobe has released patches for its Reader and Acrobat products to plug a hole in the Flash Player that was first reported in March and is being used in attacks on the Internet.
Congress stepped into the brewing controversy over a recently disclosed tracking feature in most versions of Apple’s popular iPhone. Representative Ed Markey (D-Mass) has written a letter to Apple CEO Steve Jobs asking for more information about the feature (PDF), suggesting that it may run afoul of the Federal Communications Act.
A security researcher who identified holes in SCADA software used by utilities in China has issued a new warning to that country’s CERT about insecure Web infrastructure, including an e-mail server that allows any Web user to create their own Chinese government mail account.
Security researchers have discovered a hidden iPhone feature that secretly tracks and saves the meanderings of the phone – and presumably its owner.
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