• U.K. government slashes police's cybercrime budget by 30 percent

    When on the opposition benches, Tory MP James Brokenshire (Old Bexley & Sidcup) said: “if you don’t prioritize cybercrime you compromise national cyber-security”; he is now a junior Home Office minister, presiding over a 30 percent cut in the cybercrime budget of the U.K. national police; security experts, industry, and academics are not happy

  • Aussies revamp cyberdefense strategy

    The Australian federal government has decided to stop supporting AusCERT in favor of a new computer emergency response team more focused on providing an early warning system for utilities, banks, and other critical infrastructure firms

  • Melissa Hathaway highlights nine important cyber bills

    Congress is getting more and more involved in cyber issues; Melissa Hathaway, former White House cybersecurity official, examines the pending legislation and highlights nine bills — out of the 40-odd bills at various stages in the legislative process — which she considers to be the most important ones to watch

  • ITU for cyber treaty to tackle cyber security problems

    ITU mulls an international cyber treaty to tackle cyber crime; the cyber treaty will have elements including governments being committed to protect cyber security and citizens not harboring terrorists in their own territories

  • National Security Agency holds 2010 Cyber Defense Exercise

    NSA, service academy experts test advanced tactics and technologies for cyber security in 2010 Cyber Defense Exercise; teams will compete in real-world strategies and tactics for building smart cyber defenses, fending off hackers, and eradicating malware; the West Point teams have won the competition in the last three years

  • Safer e-cards for passports, e-IDs, and electronic voting

    Researchers find serious security drawbacks in chips that are being embedded in e-passports and other e-IDs, and in credit, debit, and “smart” cards; the vulnerabilities of this electronic approach — and the vulnerability of the private information contained in the chips — are becoming more acute; using simple devices constructed from $20 disposable cameras and copper cooking-gas pipes, the researchers demonstrated how easily the cards’ radio frequency (RF) signals can be disrupted; the method can also be used to corrupt the results of electronic voting machines

  • Congress to address important cybersecurity initiatives

    Congress is setting to tackle important cybersecurity-related issues — including the confirmation hearing on Army Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander to be military cyber commander, markup sessions on bills to fund cybersecurity research and development, and realign the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) laboratories

  • New York Computer Forensics Show to be held in New York 19-20 April

    “Like it or not, every computer is a potential crime scene and must be treated with care” — this may serve as the motto for the New York Computer Forensics Show; IT professionals, lawyers, and accountants must acquaint themselves with the emerging field of computer forensics so they can better serve and protect the companies for which they work

  • First computer forensics private investigation firm opens in Nevada

    Expert Data Forensics is the first computer forensics-only PI firm in the state of Nevada; the firm says it has already helped in almost a hundred clients get the electronic evidence used to make a difference in the outcome of their cases; the data is retrieved from cell phones, PDAs, and computers

  • To avoid cyberwar and protect infrastructure -- fight cybercrime first

    Fighting cybercrime is the first step to avoiding cyberwar, protecting infrastructure; Christopher Painter, the White House’s senior director for cybersecurity: “There are a couple of things we need to do to harden [critical infrastructure] targets” — “But the other thing you need to do is reduce the threat. And the predominant threat we face is the criminal threat — the cybercrime threat in all of its varied aspects”

  • A small industry emerges to support would-be credit card thieves, malware writers

    There is money to be made in credit card theft, so a small industry has emerged to help commercialize the business; a software kit, known as Zeus, epitomizes the commercialization of the malware services industry: as is the case with other malicious software, Zeus can easily be bought online, in this case for between $400 and $700; detailed instructions on how to use it are readily available, too; to check whether a piece of malware is on the security companies’ blacklists, hackers can send their creations to Web sites such as virtest.com, which for just $1 will try the code out on more than twenty antivirus products; if the malware fails the test, would-be criminals can simply upload their malware to another site that will tweak it to render it unrecognizable

  • U.S. cybercrime losses double

    The value of Internet crime loss complaints in the United States rose from $265 million in 2008 to reach $560 million last year; U.S. businesses lost $120 million in the third quarter of 2009 to phishing and Trojan-based online banking scams, according to figures from the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation

  • Top concern at RSA 2010: security of cloud computing

    Cloud computing offers efficiency and cost reduction, but it also offer new opportunities to hackers and cybercriminals; Melissa Hathaway, former senior director for cyberspace for the National Security Council, said the migration toward the cloud is gaining momentum without having satisfactorily addressed several pressing concerns; former National Security Agency technical director Brian Snow said he does not trust the cloud

  • FBI: Cyber-terrorism a real and growing threat to U.S.

    FBI director Robert Mueller: “The risks are right at our doorsteps and in some cases they are in the house”; Richard Clarke, former White House terrorism czar: “Every major company in the U.S. and Europe has been penetrated — it’s industrial warfare”

  • Deadline for Massachusetts' “Written Information Security Program” looms

    As of 1 March 2010, Massachusetts will require that all Massachusetts companies — and even companies operating outside the Commonwealth, but which do business in Massachusetts — to implement stringent personal data privacy law, the data protections pertain to not just electronically stored and transmitted information but also hard copy formats