In an e-mail interview with Threatpost, the hacker who compromised software used to manage water infrastructure for South Houston, Texas, said the district had HMI (human machine interface) software used to manage water and sewage infrastructure accessible to the Internet and used a password that was just three characters long to protect the system, making it easy picking for a remote attack.
When most people think of the Great Firewall of China, they think of government censors black holing the comments of political dissidents or conversations related to the long list of topics the governing Communist Party finds disruptive to political harmony. But in testimony before Congress, the head of a U.S.-based technology industry group said that the censorship is also taking an economic toll on Western Internet firms, as China steers Chinese consumers away from Western Web based services including Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo and Foursquare and toward domestic competitors.
The deal will settle an FTC case alleging privacy violations on the social network by forcing users to opt in to any changes to default privacy settings, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
Gamers who use the digital distribution network Steam were warned that their account information may have been exposed to hackers following a compromise of the company’s Web page and back end databases. The incident yielded a slew of sensitive customer information, including user’s passwords and encrypted credit card numbers, Steam said.
After months as a consumer-only beta, Google finally opened up its Google+ social network to companies this week, launching Google Brand pages. While response to the new brand pages was tepid (Robert Scoble penned a rather scathing review), it didn’t take long for folks poking around the new feature to identify a serious shortcoming: Google brand pages allow pretty much anyone to stake out a page for any brand, regardless of their affiliation with it.
The “up side” of social networks like Facebook, Twitter and G+ are well known. But the down side of these networks for both users and for organizations that employ them are only now becoming clear. Worms, malware and spam are just the beginning of the security problems engendered by the social net. In this exclusive interview, conducted via e-mail, Threatpost editor Paul Roberts asked Joe Gottlieb, the CEO of security event management firm Sensage, about the many, subtle ways that social networks are eroding organizations’ online defenses.
An indictment filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York charges seven individuals with a a global scheme to commit Internet advertising fraud. The scheme infected more than four million machines in over 100 countries with malware. It is believed to have netted the scammers more than $14 million in commissions from online advertisers.
Online criminals registered far fewer Web domains for use in phishing attacks in the first half of 2011, in what may signal a decrease in phishing scams, according to a global phishing survey released this month by the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG).
Adobe has issued a security update for its Shockwave Player to address critical security issues in the popular media player.
Poor design and usability issues make leading online privacy management tools ineffective, according to researchers at CMU’s Cylab. The report said the results suggest that the current system of industry-led opt out protections is “fundamentally flawed.”
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