Ryan Naraine

From Forbes (Charlotte Dunlap)
Security breaches continue to plague organizations, causing CIOs to question whether their traditional network security solutions are adequate for protecting against increasingly sophisticated cybercriminals.
Recently, it was reported that foreign hackers broke into the Pentagon’s $300 billion fighter plane weapons program, a security breach apparently achieved through contractors’ computers. The news is particularly disheartening to CIOs, because if the federal government–with all of its brain power and billions in funds–is still grappling with keeping its data secure, how can organizations and enterprises expect to avoid Internet threats and costly data breaches? Read the full story [forbes.com]

From DarkReading (Kelly Jackson Higgins)
The cleanup cost for fixing a bug in a homegrown Web application ranges anywhere from $400 to $4,000 to repair, depending on the vulnerability and the way it’s fixed.
Security experts traditionally have been hesitant to calculate the actual cost associated with bug fixes because there are so many variables, including the severity of the vulnerability, differences in man-hour rates, and the makeup of the actual fix. Read the full story [darkreading.com]

From The H Security
According to information which only recently came to light, in early April a botnet consisting of an estimated 100,000 PCs apparently destroyed itself – as its control server send out a command that made Windows inoperable. The botnet was based on the Zeus [rsa.com] botnet tool kit, which allows criminals to infect and subsequently remotely control users’ PCs. Read the full story [h-online.com]

From CNet (Elinor Mills)

Women are more affected by identity fraud then men are, according to a new survey that also found that it takes women longer to restore their identities but they also tend to change their behavior afterward.
In a survey of 808 U.S. households, half of which reported fraud, 28 percent of women said they had been victims of identity fraud compared with 21 percent for men. Read the full story [cnet.com]

From The Register (Dan Goodin)

Electronic payments processor Heartland Payment Systems said Thursday it has allocated $12.6m to cover a security breach that exposed sensitive card holder data crossing its network.

More than half that amount involves a fine MasterCard has assessed banks that did business with Heartland, said company CEO Robert Carr, according to this conference-call transcript [seekingalpha.com]. The remainder covers legal costs and other expenses related to the breach, which was discovered in January. Read the full story [theregister.co.uk]

From ZDNet (Dancho Danchev)
A newly discovered email worm dubbed OSX/Tored-A once again puts the spotlight on the potential worm-ability, and malware spreading tactics targeting Apple’s OS X.
The worm propagates through emails harvested from infected hosts, and has a backdoor functionality allowing its author to perform the following actions if a successful remote connection is established – attempts to create a botnet, has keylogging functionality, and can also perform DDoS attacks as well as send spam. Read the full story [zdnet.com]

From Computerworld (Jaikumar Vijayan)
A government audit has found more than 760 high-risk vulnerabilities in Web applications used to support Air Traffic Control (ATC) operations around the country.