Hacks

Car maker Nissan became the latest high profile firm to acknowledge being hacked. The company issued a statement last week saying that it detected a virus infection on its network that resulted int he theft of employee login credentials from a company data store.

UPDATE: Security researchers are warning about the risk posed by an embarrassing security hole in industrial control software by the firm RuggedCom. A hidden administrative account could give remote attackers easy access to critical equipment that is used to manage a wide range of critical infrastructure, including rail lines, traffic control systems and electrical substations.

In what looks like the IT equivalent of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster, purloined data and documents, including source code belonging to the U.S. software firm VMWare, continue to bubble up from the networks of a variety of compromised Chinese firms, according to “Hardcore Charlie,” an anonymous hacker who has claimed responsibility for the hacks.

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.

Italian security researcher Luigi Auriemma was trying to play a trick on his brother when he accidentally discovered two vulnerabilities in all current versions of Samsung TVs and Blu-Ray systems that could allow an attacker to gain remote access to those devices.

Students at MIT took to the university’s Cecil and Ida Green Building over the weekend to transform the 21-story research building into an oversized, playable game of Tetris. Emulating the classic ’80s video game with the help of a console and 153 color-changing LED lights, students were able to rotate and move colored blocks across the building. Like the original puzzle game, once someone lost, all of the colored blocks fell to the bottom of the building.

BOSTON–Accountability, not superior technology, has kept Apple’s iOS ecosystem free of viruses, even as the competing Android platform strains under the weight of repeated malicious code outbreaks, say researchers Dan Guido of the firm Trail of Bits and Michael Arpaia of iSEC Partners.