Hacks

Parts of pop icon Michael Jackson’s discography, possibly his entire back catalog, have allegedly been stolen from Sony Music by hackers, according to a report from BBC this morning.

If the folks behind the photo sharing Web site Pinterest were looking for some validation that their fledgelings social media site had “arrived,” they got it this weekend, after scammers jumped on the site and used it to direct Pinterest users to survey scam Web sites.

NASA has been hit repeatedly by hackers during the last two years – including an incident where attackers compromised systems at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

A security compromise at Linode, the New Jersey-based Linux cloud provider, has warned customers that hackers breached a Web-based customer service portal used by the company and emptied the Bitcoin accounts of eight Linode customers. One Linode customer reports the theft of Bitcoins totalling around $14,000.

SAN FRANCISCO–The PCI DSS standard has taken a beating from critics, security experts and CSOs virtually since the day it appeared in its earliest form in 2004. It’s evolved quite a bit in the intervening years, but it hasn’t shaken any of that criticism, and security folks say there’s a good reason for that: a PCI-compliant network is no real hurdle to exploitation.

by B.K. DeLongWikileaks’ decision this week to post the first of five million emails from Texas-based strategic intelligence firm Stratfor shone a spotlight on what experts say is a serious and growing problem: lax data, network and physical security at third party vendors and service providers.  But organizations that think they can wash their hands of the security mess caused by business partners and contractors may be in for a rude awakening.

SAN FRANCISCO – A panel of security and policy experts said that, despite dire warnings about the information warfare capabilities of China and other developing nations, the risk of an all-out cyber war is remote, and that the U.S. still holds many of the cards.