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.
A 21 year-old Ohio man associated with the Anonymous Internet collective is in detention after boasting on Twitter about his involvement in the hack of the Utah Chiefs of Police Association and the Salt Lake City Police Department.
The head of Google’s Web spam team says that the company has pushed warning messages to some 20,000 Web site owners that their sites may be compromised and are performing “weird” redirections, possibly to malicious Web sites.
A 15-year-old who claimed he was bored when he turned to hacking was arrested for breaking into almost 260 companies during the first three months of this year, according to a ZDNet article published earlier today.Austria’s Federal Criminal Police Office said the teenager, who used the hacker handle ACK!3STX, used tools available on the Internet to scan for vulnerable Web sites and publish stolen data. He then bragged about his exploits on Twitter. Victims included sports companies and adult entertainment sites, among many others.
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.
Estimates of the extent of cyber crime are hopelessly overblown, two computer security researchers argue in an editorial from Sunday’s New York Times.
An Iranian national exposed confidential account details for some three million bank accounts in that country, prompting warnings from banking officials.
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.
UPDATE: A critical security flaw has been identified in a component of the latest version of Backtrack, a popular version of Linux that is used by security professionals for penetration testing. The flaw is in WICD, an open source utility that can be used to manage networks in Linux operating systems.
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