TJX Companies, owner of the TJ Maxx and TK Maxx retail chains, now estimates a data theft earlier this year has cost it ÂŁ59m. The news came in a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing yesterday. In an earlier filing, TJX Companies, had tallied the cost of the network break-ins at about $20 million, though it noted that figure could go higher. TJX said yesterday it has more clearly determined “its potential liability from the computer intrusion(s) and recorded an after-tax charge of $118 million.”
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August 15, 2007 (Computerworld) — A self-proclaimed hacker crew calling itself “clpwn” — as in “clown” — that’s been bragging about how it’s defaced sites such as CNN and Playboy Casino isn’t doing anything earth-shattering, said a security researcher today. But the group is a reminder of how things once were, when true hackers plied their trade for notoriety rather than profit.
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Firefox 3.0′s first beta has been delayed at least six weeks, says Mozilla engineers, and it now won’t appear until the middle of September.
In a posting to the mozilla.dev.planning group, Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla’s vice president of engineering, suggested a revamped milestone schedule for Firefox 3.0, the next major update to the popular open-source browser. Among the changes: a postponement of the first beta, slated as recently as last week to debut July 31. It’s not expected until September 18 at the earliest.
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Spanish police have arrested a 28-year-old man and charged him with creating and distributing malware that infected an estimated 115,000 mobile phones, the French AFP news service has reported. The unidentified defendant, who was arrested in Valencia after a seven-month investigation, allegedly created more than 20 variants of the Cabir and Commwarrior worms, which target mobile phones running the Symbian operating system and infect nearby devices via Bluetooth.
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Multiple hacker groups are using a “construction kit” supplied by the author of a Trojan horse program discovered last October to develop and unleash more dangerous variants of the original malware. Already such variants have stolen sensitive information belonging to at least 10,000 individuals and sent the data to rogue servers in China, Russia and the United States, according to Don Jackson, a security researcher at SecureWorks Inc. of Atlanta. The stolen data includes Social Security numbers, online account information, bank account and credit card numbers, user names and passwords and other data that users would usually input during an SSL session.
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The large-scale attack is based on the multiexploit hacker kit dubbed ‘Mpack’. Attackers armed with an exploit toolkit have launched massive attacks in Europe from a network of at least 10,000 hacked Web sites, with infections spreading worldwide, several security companies warned Monday.
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Sophos says Java-based content is to blame. Child pornography is being injected into web forums by hackers using Cross Site Scripting (XSS), a technique typically deployed to distribute malware. According to Sophos principal virus researcher Fraser Howard, the attacks occur because many websites allow Java-based content on their forums, or do not require adequate user authentication for posting.
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Mozilla has released the next-to-last planned alpha edition of Firefox 3.0, the first preview to include a major chunk of the browser’s revamped bookmark and history tool. Alpha 5 of Firefox 3.0, which still carries the codename Gran Paradiso, includes the bookmarks portion of Places, the feature that at one time was slated to appear in Firefox 2.0. Last year, however, Mozilla yanked the searchable bookmark-browser history from 2.0 and said it would appear in 2007′s Version 3.0.
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Ever since its debut, Firefox has garnered a reputation for being an enormously customizable program, both through its add-on architecture and its internal settings. In fact, many of Firefox’s settings aren’t exposed through the Tools > Options menu; the only way to change them is to edit them manually. In this article, we’ll explore some of the most useful Firefox settings that you can change on your own, and that aren’t normally available through the program’s graphical interface.
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Hackers can drop malicious code into systems running Mozilla Corp.‘s Firefox when the browser is armed with any of several high-profile add-ons, including Google Toolbar and Yahoo Toolbar, a researcher revealed today. Mozilla has acknowledged the risk posed by some extensions.
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