The dollar-value of online criminal activity conducted by the Russian mafia and other criminal organizations doubled in 2011, according to a new report from the Russian security firm Group-IB.
Data from the Massachusetts Office of Consumer Affairs & Business Regulation (OCABR) shows that 3.2 million residents – almost half the population of the state- have been the victim of a data breach in the last four years.
A long list of security, networking and computer science experts have signed a letter sent to lawmakers on Monday, asking them to drop support for CISPA and other proposed cybersecurity bills because they consider the measures overly broad and say they would infringe on users’ privacy and civil liberties. The group, which includes Bruce Schneier, Peter Neumann and others, said the bills’ focus on allowing the sharing of users’ traffic with government agencies would “unnecessarily trade our civil liberties for the promise of improved network security.”
The Iranian Oil Ministry has acknowledged that a virus outbreak has compromised servers and Web sites used by the Ministry, but denies that any non-public data was exposed.
A South Carolina man was arrested yesterday on charges stemming from a data breach that may have leaked personal information on more than 200,000 Medicaid beneficiaries in the state, including their names, phone numbers, addresses, birth dates and Medicare ID numbers according to a report in the newspaper The State.
In a ruling that could be felt throughout the business world, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in California ruled that a man did not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) after pilfering contacts from the client database of his former employer to help jumpstart his competing business venture.
Privacy advocates continue urging for a wider federal investigation into Google Street View practices following Google’s $25,000 fine for stonewalling federal officials during an earlier probe of Wi-Fi snooping allegations.
The U.S. and other advanced nations face a drastic cyber security skills gap. Attacks from sophisticated and unsophisticated attackers are on the rise, even as more and more companies and government agencies move more of what they do online to Web based services and the cloud. Of course, the skills gap requires a bottom-up rethink of the way that technology skills are taught at both the primary and secondary level. That’s no easy task in a decentralized and highly regulated education system such as the one that exists in the U.S. where resources are addressed more towards basic skill acquisition than to teaching advanced cyber skills. Still, the Obama Administration has put cyber security at the top of its domestic and military security agendas, and there’s some evidence of positive change.
A British teenager believed to be the hacker TriCk, a founding member of TeaMp0isoN has reportedly been arrested after launching a denial of service attack against an anti-terrorism hotline in the UK.
Industrial control system vendor Koyo moved to fix vulnerabilities in its ECOM brand programmable logic controllers (PLCs) after researchers, in January, revealed that the devices were vulnerable to brute force password guessing attacks.
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