An amusing story reached us from Australia last week that even has a moral attached to it. It seems that the Australian federal police were hacked after they boasted of their recent hacker bust. Early last week, an episode of ABC's Four Corners, an Australian show that looks at real-world events, took it upon itself to report on a police investigation that was busy ferreting out hackers across the land. According to Australian newswires, the police "brazenly boasted" about a number of recent h... [More]

A recent court case involving Google is making legal history. It was decided in court that Google has to reveal the identity of a blogger who called a model "s skank". The blog - 'Skanks in NYC' - and which was hosted by Blogger.com, owned by Google, made a number of personal comments about a model, promptly triggering legal action. For us, the most interesting aspect of this case is, that the court ruled that bloggers could not be anonymous. This can be seen a result of the maturity of the In... [More]

In its report “How Mobile Handsets Will Deliver 24x7 Social Computing” Forrester Research is encouraging companies to harness the power of mobile phones in order to communicate and stay connected with their customers. But when we look at the security aspect, users of mobile phones may be vulnerable…. More and more companies let their employees use their smartphones and mobile phones for business purposes, but it's not common for companies to extend their security envelope ar... [More]

Here is some good news - the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) has published guidelines and best practices for mitigating large-scale botnet infections on residential Internet networks. The timing of this publication couldn’t be better - just after Twitter and a number of other social networking sites were effectively downed for several hours by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on one individual blogger. Regardless of the motives behind this DDoS attack last week, t... [More]

Last Thursday, a Georgian blogger called "Cyxymu" - with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, Google's Blogger and YouTube - was targeted in a denial-of-service (DoS) attack.  This technique uses a network of tens of thousands of compromised computers (aka “botnets") to flood a website's servers with page view requests, making it impossible for legitimate traffic to get through. If the amount of connection requests is large enough, it can crash an entire website, as happened to... [More]

Proof that life in the world of brick and mortar is inextricably linked to the online world was brought home to the citizens of New Jersey late last month when no less than seven water mains broke in the Jersey City Heights. Due to low water pressure in the Heights following the ruptures, fire officials posted four water tanker trucks at two locations in the area for use in the event of a fire. That's a pretty serious response to a computer glitch that appears to have been triggered by false d... [More]

Research from Platform Computing, taking in the responses of more than 100 senior managers at the International Supercomputing Conference in June, has discovered that the adoption of private cloud technologies will increase steadily as 2009 progresses. The reason is simple: companies are looking to cut costs without impacting performance. When citing potential stumbling blocks, 21% of the responding companies cited security as an obstacle. Security, however, does not need to be a hurdle. Publi... [More]

Researchers from Radware - a fellow security company - were busy at the Defcon security event in Las Vegas this weekend, showing an application that stages a classic man-in-the-middle attack on computers when looking for updates across a public WiFi network. The Ippon (meaning “game over” in Judo) application reportedly looks for update requests for around 100 popular applications and then responds with a malware-loaded “update”. Clever stuff, except that if you do anyt... [More]

Looking at the latest statistics from CIFAS (the UK's fraud prevention service) we see a scary and ugly truth: Identify theft – which can happen to any of us! - has soared to 74 per cent in the first six months of the year! This increase is still surprising, although the activities of criminal gangs on the so-called carder forums - where criminals buy and sell cardholder-related data - which we reported - in April 2008. You can read more on this trend in our Q1 2008 security trends ... [More]