• Chinese hackers steal South Korean defense secrets

    Chinese hackers have stolen secrets on South Korea’s defense and foreign affairs by using bogus e-mails claiming to come from Seoul officials and diplomats; similar attacks originating in China-based servers briefly crippled U.S. and South Korean government and commercial Web sites in July 2009

  • U.S. considering Aussie Internet security program

    The Obama administration is considering adoption of parts of an Internet security scheme which will go into effect in Australia in December; the plan will allow Internet service providers to alert customers if their computers are taken over by hackers — and could limit these customers’ online access if they do not fix the problem

  • U.K. security firms say GCHQ's cyberattack warning overwrought

    U.K. cybersecurity industry insiders say last week’s warnings by Britain’s cybersecurity chief about the cyber threat the U.K. was facing may have over-hyped threats — and may have been related more to the run-up to the U.K. government’s comprehensive spending review announcement than to new threat information

  • Microsoft cleaned 6.5 million zombie PCs during April-June 2010

    Microsoft cleaned in excess of 6.5 million zombie computers between April and June 2010, but the company’s efforts alone are not enough to put a stop to the increasing threat that botnets represent to users, businesses and critical infrastructure

  • Britain faces "real and credible" cyber threat: intelligence chief

    In a rare public speech, Iain Lobban, director of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), said that there is a “real and credible” cyber threat to U.K. infrastructure, and that Britain’s economy could be at risk if effective protection against cyber attacks was not developed

  • Malware will soon steal behavioral patterns

    Examples of malware which steals personal information are all around us, sometimes for the purpose of making it public and at other times for profit; computer scientists predict that a new generation of malware will mine social networks for people’s private patterns of behavior

  • Students think hacking is "cool"

    A third of students surveyed thought that hacking was “cool,” and a similar number thought it was “easy”; the survey found that 37 percent had hacked Facebook accounts, 26 percent e-mail accounts, with 10 percent breaching online shopping accounts; an entrepreneurial 15 percent revealed that they hacked to make money

  • GTEC buys Zytel, bolstering cyber, intelligence capabilities

    GTEC pays $26.8 millions in cash for Maryland-based Zytel; little is known about Zytel’s actual products — all the company’s work is classified and all employees are cleared at the Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information level — but it develops cybersecurity and mission systems in support of the critical intelligence, counterterrorism, and cyber-warfare missions of its national-security clients

  • Smartphone security products begin to make it to market

    A modern smartphone has many of the same capabilities as a PC and is way more vulnerable to certain kinds of attack; even so, few smartphone users see security apps as essential; Austrian security testing lab AV-Comparatives has justreleased a study comparing four smartphone security products

  • Shop Shield privacy protection expanded to IE browser

    Experts say that the best way to assure the safety of financial and personal identifying information (PII) transmitted on the Internet, and prevent it from being lost, stolen, or misused, is to keep it private by not transmitting it to Web sites in the first place; Shop Shield allows consumers to engage in commercial transactions on the Web without giving these Web sites information such as e-mail addresses, passwords, usernames, phone numbers, billing addresses, credit card numbers, or other user payment information; Shop Shield even allows consumers to do business on the Web without giving out their names

  • House Cybersecurity Caucus launches new Web site

    Billions of dollars are spent on cybersecurity; the House cybersecurity caucus has launched a new Web site, and observers say it could provide a valuable public service if it helps aggregate disparate activities and acts as a Federal cybersecurity information hub

  • Cyberthreat "deniers" say cybersecurity experts are crying wolf

    There are those who argue that security experts warn about cyber threat are only scaring people in order to sell their security products and consulting services; one observer says: “To be sure, the financial interests of those warning about cybersecurity vulnerability should be disclosed, but their warnings shouldn’t be dismissed either— Just because you can still download movies from Netflix or update your Facebook status doesn’t mean everything’s fine”

  • Huntsville, Alabama, to become center for the war on cyber crimes

    Mayor Tommy Battle unveiled plans to build the Cyber Center complex — a 52-building campus housing government agencies and academic teams dealing with cyber crimes

  • Move to IPv6 may create a "security nightmare"

    IPv6, the Internet’s next-generation addressing scheme is so radically different from the current one that its adoption is likely to cause severe security headaches for those who adopt it; the radical overhaul still is not ready for prime time — in large part because IT professionals have not worked out a large number of security threats facing those who rely on it to route traffic over the net

  • Software vendors will be forced to fix vulnerabilities under deadline

    Software vendors tend to take their time fixing security vulnerabilities discovered in their products; Zero Day Initiative, which serves as a broker between security researchers who find flaws and software companies who need to fix them, says there are 122 outstanding vulnerabilities that have been reported to vendors and which have not been patched yet; the oldest on the list was reported to IBM in May 2007 and more than thirty of the outstanding vulnerabilities are older than a year; Zero Day Initiative has just announced a new policy: vendors will now have six months to fix vulnerabilities, after which time the Zero Day Initiative will release limited details on the vulnerability, along with mitigation information so organizations and consumers who are at risk from the hole can protect themselves