U.S. Congress Hears Of Growing Cyber Espionage Threat To U.S.
Testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives’ Homeland Security Committee painted a grim picture about the problem of cyber espionage against U.S. companies and interests.
Hacks
FTC Sues Wyndham Over Breaches Linked to $10m In Fraud
UPDATE: The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has fined Wyndham Hotels for a string of data breaches that resulted in information on hundreds of thousands of customers being lost to cyber criminals.
Two Members of LulzSec Plead Guilty to Cyber Crimes
Two members of the hacker group Lulz Security (LulzSec) pleaded guilty today to taking part in a cyber crime spree that launched attacks against Web sites belonging to law enforcement, corporations and media companies.
Ryan Cleary, 20, of Wickford, Essex and Jake Davis, 19, of Lerwick, Shetland admitted in a London courtroom to two counts of conspiracy to do an unauthorized act or acts with intent to impair, or with recklessness as to impairing, the operation of a computer or computers, according to numerous published reports.
Twitter officials say it was a “cascading bug” and not the handiwork of hacktivists that brought down the microblogging site today in two separate outages.
There is a line of thinking that pervades and pollutes the discussions of many sporting events, and it goes something like this: “You can’t let LeBron James/Derek Jeter/Lionel Messi beat you. You have to force someone else to beat you.” It’s a flawed strategy for a number of reasons, but it’s even more problematic when you realize that this same mentality could be applied to information security.
Software failures were behind 24 percent of all the medical device recalls in 2011, according to data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which said it is gearing up its labs to spend more time analyzing the quality and security of software-based medical instruments and equipment.
One of the attackers who has been targeting Syrian anti-government activists with malware and surveillance tools has returned and upped the ante with the use of the BlackShades RAT, a remote-access tool that gives him the ability to spy on victims machines through keylogging and screenshots.
A significant flaw in the Face.com mobile application KLIK has been fixed to prevent Facebook and Twitter users from having their accounts hijacked.KLIK is a camera app that uses face recognition to tag friends in Facebook photos in real time. It also apparently granted access to KLIK users’ private authentication tokens for Facebook and Twitter accounts, allowing them to be taken over by another user.
One day after a hacker using the handle “Reckz0r” claims to have infiltrated 79 different banks and leaked information allegedly belonging to Visa and MasterCard customers, there are questions about whether a hack actually occurred.
In case you thought that the mass exodus of researchers from TippingPoint’s Zero Day Initiative in recent months meant that the demand for third-party vulnerability markets was waning, fear not. Several former members of the ZDI team have come back together to form a new firm called Exodus Intelligence that will have its own vulnerability purchasing program, among other offerings.
