Thieves have stolen a computer database from a company that specialises in gathering evidence from mobile phone networks to help police track suspected terrorists.
There has been a significant rise in the amount of spam originating from Chinese domains, according to the latest statistics from security vendor Symantec. In a report issued on Monday, Symantec noted a sharp spike in spam messages containing URLs that use “.cn”, the top-level domain (TLD) for China. During the month of July, the number of spam domains rose from virtually zero to around 450.
he corporate network will never be fully protected from malicious attacks if businesses overlook the need to secure end-point devices such as printers, according to Lexmark. Minh Tran, regional product manager for Lexmark Asia-Pacific, declined to cite any known occurrences of security breaches via the use of printers, but said companies need to make sure their printing devices â which are part of their network â are properly protected to eliminate any vulnerability.
A British Web designer has been given a suspended jail sentence after hacking into a rival’s Web site. Mark Hopkins, of Bromsgrove, near Birmingham, pleaded guilty to unauthorised access to computer systems. He was sentenced on Thursday to 20 weeks in custody suspended for two years. The victim was ME Publishing, which publishes the respected Motorcycle Trader magazine.
Jonathan “c0mrade” James shocked the computing world when he hacked into Pentagon and NASA systems in 1999 at age 15, becoming the youngest person to be incarcerated (for six months) under the federal cybercrime law. Now 23, James talks about his motives and the state of online security.
Q: What were your reasons for targeting the U.S. Department of Defense and NASA back in 1999?
A: Well, I had read the book The Cuckoo’s Egg [by Clifford Stoll], which probably had a lot to do with it. Also, my choice of who to hack was pretty much government targets or corporate targets, and corporate targets didn’t have the intrigue of the military ones. It was a good feeling knowing I had access to the computers of the most powerful military in the world. I’m surprised my head didn’t explode.
LIKE SPIES in a John LeCarrĂŠ novel, network security professionals inhabit an ethically shadowy world.
A California death row inmate’s fate depends in part on the word “hacker.” Enrique Zambrano, a former Berkeley, Calif., government bureaucrat, was convicted of murdering a fellow waterfront commissioner to prevent him from testifying against Zambrano in a 1988 assault case. The killing was brutal. A hiker in the Lafayette hills found the headless body of Luis Reyna, the other Berkeley Waterfront Commission member, hacked to pieces. A forensic pathologist later testified that the neck vertebrae had been sawed off and the lower jaw was missing.
The web is getting bigger, but also more dangerous. In the early days, it was like the Wild West â there were dangers out there, but if companies kept their wits about them and knew the basics of self-defence, they could get by.
Not anymore. Security experts are already looking back on 2006 as the year that web threats matured and became increasingly sophisticated. It was a year in which organised cyber criminals increasingly turned their attention away from email towards web traffic as their target of choice.
First Netflix slashed its prices. Now the company’s under attack from a hacker who found a way to keep the company’s downloaded movies. The hacker claims to have cracked the digital rights-management software encoded in Netflix “Watch Now” movies, enabling those who follow his step-by-step guide to keep the movies indefinitely.
Google has received US antitrust approval to acquire web-based security provider Postini, US officials said on Wednesday. Antitrust authorities completed their review of the $625m (ÂŁ306m) deal without taking any action to block it, the US Federal Trade Commission said in a notice.