IT security and control firm Sophos has reported on its blog that webpages of the US Consulate General in St.Petersburg, Russia, were attacked by hackers earlier this week. The infected pages have since been cleaned up. The attack was part of a larger campaign by cybercriminals in which vulnerable web servers were targeted. This resulted in more than 400 webpages around the world being infected over the last week, with the majority of the compromised pages hosted in Russia.
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A member of a prominent House of Lords committee has repeated calls for a data-breach notification law. Speaking at an event organised by Intellect on Thursday, Lord Harris of Haringey said: “I support the recommendation the [Lords Science and Technology] Committee made that there should be a data-breach notification law. Manufacturers of equipment, producers of software, holders of data, and internet service providers should all be much more security conscious than is currently the case. In some cases [of data breaches] the financial penalties are not strong enough.”
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Two State Department websites based in Russia have been hacked and appear to be infecting visitors with malware, InfoWorld reports. Particularly compromised was the U.S. Consulate General for St. Petersburg. But by the time Sophos researchers checked the site, the infection had been irradicated. But a review of archived pages revealed the malicious code. As of Thursday, Sophos customers were still being blocked from accessing the St. Petersburg consulate Web server, which is hosted on the stpetersburg.usconsulate.gov and www.stpetersburg-usconsulate.ru domains.
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UK hacks have begun receiving invites to an Apple event scheduled to be held at the Mac maker’s Regent Street, London store on 18 September. Headed “Mum is no longer the word”, the email has already got journos forecasting the UK debut of the iPhone. Not that we’ve had one, of course. Apple’s policy of not engaging with websites that speculate about its future products takes in The Register and, unsurprisingly, its sister-site Register Hardware.
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Criminals behind the Storm worm have created a botnet containing millions of PCs, which have a combined computing power greater than the most powerful supercomputer in existence. The Storm worm botnet has been estimated to control between one million and five million computers, which one researcher says makes it more powerful than IBM’s Blue Gene/L supercomputer. Peter Guttman, a computer sciences security researcher, wrote in an email posted on insecure.org’s website: “This may be the first time that a top 10 supercomputer has been controlled not by a government or mega-corporation but by criminals. The question remains, now that they have the world’s most powerful supercomputer system at their disposal, what are they going to do with it?”
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Nokia has released a security appliance for large businesses, building on work it has been carrying out with Intel and the security company Check Point. Nokia’s IP2450 security platform for firewalls and VPNs is the first product to result from the collaboration between the three companies. The two-rack unit contains two quad-core Intel Xeon 5355 processors and runs on Nokia’s IPSO operating system. Nokia claims it offers the lowest price per port and lowest price per gigabit of firewall throughput in its class.
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Spammers have hijacked computers at drug manufacturer Pfizer, causing them to send junk emails advertising the company’s product Viagra. At least 138 of Pfizer’s IP addresses are being used to send the spam after being loaded with Trojan software, it emerged this week. Aside from Viagra, the spam advertises penis-enlargement drugs, fake Rolexes and shares, according to botnet-tracking company Support Intelligence, which said that those IP addresses have now been blacklisted by anti-spam companies.
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Last week, an unusual sound could be heard in the skies above the offices of UK newspapers: prayers of thanks from the defence correspondents. Fed delicious titbits about Chinese hackers breaking into the Pentagon and Whitehall, they responded by cooking up a three-course dinner of techno-threat, cyber-warfare and Oriental peril. We have been here before. Over the duration of the Cold War, the game of spy versus spy rapidly evolved from information gathering through to a vital component of the peculiarly stable political co-dependency of East and West. Both sides knew what the other was up to: both knew when to look the other way, when to quietly take action, and when to make a noise.
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Foreign spies have hacked into New Zealand government computers in recent months but no classified information was stolen, Prime Minister Helen Clark said Tuesday. Clark’s attempt to reassure followed revelations by the country’s top spy, Security Intelligence Service head Warren Tucker, that foreign sources had hacked into government computer systems and stolen information.
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WELLINGTON, N.Z. â Foreign spies have hacked into New Zealand government computers in recent months but no classified information was stolen, Prime Minister Helen Clark said Tuesday. Ms. Clark’s attempt to reassure followed revelations by the country’s top spy, Security Intelligence Service head Warren Tucker, that foreign sources had hacked into government computer systems and stolen information. Later checks found hard-to-detect software had been installed that could be used to seize control of computer systems.
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