A security breach initially believed contained to about 50 employee records now appears to involve almost 300,000 students, faculty and employees at a Florida college.Officials at Northwest Florida State College in Niceville today confirmed a massive data breach and hundreds of thousands of stolen records that include names, birth dates and Social Security numbers.
Less than a month after the Nitol botnet takedown, Microsoft has released data casting more scrutiny of supply chain security. In its latest Security Intelligence Report (SIR) for the first half of 2012, Microsoft has connected the most prevalent malware families involved in supply chain compromises, including malicious add-ons pre-installed on PCs by manufacturers, as well as pirated software available on peer-to-peer networks, and music and movie downloads.
Microsoft will release seven bulletins in the October Patch Tuesday next week, fixing 20 total vulnerabilities in Windows, Office, Lync and SQL Server. Only one of the bulletins is rated critical, while the six others are rated important.
Microsoft announced today it’s reached a settlement with the operator of a Chinese Web site whose domain and sub-domains hosted more than 500 kinds of malware, including the Nitol botnet found on brand new computers.
Lashing out against what they believe is a hopelessly broken international education system, the hacker collective Team Ghostshell published some 120,000 records from a number of the world’s top universities.
A Romanian computer scientist discovered that the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) was storing its members’ usernames and passwords in plaint-text on a publically accessible file transfer protocol (FTP) server.
Passwords, unfortunately, still are the main authentication mechanism on most Web sites, including all of the popular webmail services, such as Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail. Many sites encourage users to pick complex and long passwords, so it’s surprising to see that Microsoft now has limited Hotmail passwords to no more than 16 characters. Even more surprising, however, is that Hotmail will accept the first 16 characters of an existing, longer password, indicating that the company may have been storing users’ passwords in plaintext.
Apple has released a massive security update for iTunes on Windows, fixing more than 160 security vulnerabilities. The new version of iTunes is one of the larger security updates by any vendor in the last few years, and many of the fixes are for WebKit vulnerabilities.
With the release event for Apple’s newest iPhone model going on, quite literally, as I type, it comes as no surprise that scammers are exploiting the vast anticipation for the iPhone 5.
The chief executive of a Florida-based digital publisher said Monday he believes his company is the source of a data leak of a million Apple unique device IDs — not the FBI as a hacktivist group claimed.
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