Dozens of members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit’s host committee who submitted to background checks ahead of a meeting with President Obama may have been the victims of a data breach, according to an Associated Press report.
In an e-mail interview with Threatpost, the hacker who compromised software used to manage water infrastructure for South Houston, Texas, said the district had HMI (human machine interface) software used to manage water and sewage infrastructure accessible to the Internet and used a password that was just three characters long to protect the system, making it easy picking for a remote attack.
When most people think of the Great Firewall of China, they think of government censors black holing the comments of political dissidents or conversations related to the long list of topics the governing Communist Party finds disruptive to political harmony. But in testimony before Congress, the head of a U.S.-based technology industry group said that the censorship is also taking an economic toll on Western Internet firms, as China steers Chinese consumers away from Western Web based services including Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo and Foursquare and toward domestic competitors.
An electronic attack believed to emanate from computers in Russia reportedly destroyed a water pump belonging to an unnamed, Springfield, Illinois water utility earlier this month after hackers gained unauthorized access to that company’s industrial control system, according to published reports.
Citing a looming crisis over lax computer security, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on Wednesday that the Senate will debate cybersecurity legislation. The move comes despite the lack of a coherent Senate plan and could set up a showdown with House Republicans over the government’s role in forcing industry to strengthen cyber protections, according to a report by The Hill.
Information security failings are making it impossible for the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to get its financial house in order and could be putting taxpayers’ sensitive information at risk, according to a financial audit of the agency by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
F-Secure researchers claim that malware spreading via malicious PDF files is signed with a valid certificate stolen from the Government of Malaysia, in just the latest evidence that scammers are using gaps in the security of digital certificates to help spread malicious code.
The deal will settle an FTC case alleging privacy violations on the social network by forcing users to opt in to any changes to default privacy settings, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
An indictment filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York charges seven individuals with a a global scheme to commit Internet advertising fraud. The scheme infected more than four million machines in over 100 countries with malware. It is believed to have netted the scammers more than $14 million in commissions from online advertisers.
The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is credited with helping to create the modern Internet, used a conference to call on hackers and other visionaries to help save it.
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