UPDATE–MasterCard and Visa have confirmed that they are investigating a potentially huge data breach at one of the companies’ payment processors, which the Wall Street Journal has identified as Global Payments Inc.
The Federal Trade Commission announced on Tuesday that it had reached a settlement with RockYou over violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) after the Web site allowed hackers to gain access to the personal information of its 32 million members.
The website of Skeptical Science, a blog that is critical of climate change skeptics, was hacked over the weekend, and users’ e-mails, passwords and IP addresses were taken, according to a post on the site Sunday.
Hackers are actively exploiting weak Web site security at leading credit rating agencies and stealing customer credit reports for resale on the black market, according to a report by MSNBC.
The security firm Alienvault reports that its own research on phishing attacks against non governmental organizations supporting the Tibetan Government in Exile is now being used as bait in a new round of phishing attacks on those same NGOs.
Threatpost spent much of the last year chasing after Greg Hoglund, the founder and CEO of HB Gary. First, it was to get his reaction to the bruising encounter his firm had with the hacking group Anonymous. Then it was an endless series of requests on the aftermath of that hack, including the departure of HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr, and the company’s decision to pull out of the RSA Conference in 2011. When Greg finally did speak out it wasn’t to us.So we were happy when Hoglund, whose firm was recently acquired by the company Mantech International Corp., agreed to speak at the Kaspersky Lab Security Analysts’ Summit in Cancun, Mexico in February. His talk there on “Lateral Movement and Other APT Interaction Patterns Within the Enterprise” reinforced Hoglund’s reputation as one of the top experts on malicious code.Threatpost editor Paul Roberts caught up with Hoglund after the speech. And, while Anonymous and HBGary Federal were not up for discussion on the record, Hoglund offered some great insights into the delicate art of tracking down remote access trojans (or RATs) after they have a foothold in your network, as well as the mistakes companies make in trying to prevent and respond to security incidents.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) warned this week that political activists in Iran and Syrai are being targeted in malware attacks disgiosed as Adobe Flash Player updates on Youtube.
Microsoft said that it has not seen any evidence that hackers have figured out a way to take advantage of a critical vulnerability in the Windows Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) that the company disclosed and patched on Tuesday. The statement comes in the wake of unconfirmed reports of working exploits for the RDP hole circulating online on Thursday.
The BBC reports that they were the victim of a “sophisticated cyber-attack,” which they believe is part of an ongoing Iranian campaign to disrupt the BBC Persian Service.
A new Ubuntu Linux distribution is being marketed as “Anonymous-OS” and comes pre-loaded with tools for hacking and protecting anonymity online. However, it is unclear whether the new operating system was created by the anarchic hacking group, or even has its endorsement.
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