Blog posts with "computer security"

  According to the Internet Crime Complaint Center's (iC3) 2009 Internet Crime Report, Washington D.C. is the Cybercrime capital of the U.S. with 116 cyber-criminals per 100,000. Here is an excerpt from a news story from WTOP summarizing the findings: "IC3, a joint effort of the National White Collar Crime Center and FBI, says Nevada and Washington hold the No. 2 and No. 3 spots.  Cyber-crimes are so common victims often neglect to report them. But the number of complaints to IC3 jumped mo...

  According to recent research, anti-virus programs are not giving us full protection against hackers, such as the Chinese hackers who targeted Google recently. Take a look at this story from Prweb.com: "NSS Labs, Inc., the leading independent security testing organization, today announced the results of its evaluation of seven popular consumer endpoint security products in protecting the vulnerability exploited in the recent 'Operation Aurora' attack conducted against Google and at least 3...

  Just ran across this story about criminals replacing the credit card key pads at the cash registers at some Hancock Fabrics stores with fraudulent ones that stole pin numbers and other personal details of users. Here are some quotes from the Register:  "Crooks planted bogus payment card processing terminals at multiple locations operated by the Hancock Fabrics chain store that allowed for the theft of sensitive financial data from customers, the company warned. The personal identificatio...

Just was sent this article from cnet.com, hard to say if this was Microsoft's work or not, but appears to be counter-hacker hackers. Here is a quote: "The world's largest botnet, Zeus, has had its traffic disrupted by repeated disconnections of a Kazakhstani ISP, but a series of reconnections has revived its banking Trojan activity, according to security researchers. The botnet mainly pushes out the Zeus banking Trojan, an information-stealing keylogger that relays sensitive data back to its...

More news on the Google / China feud, here are some excerpts from ft.com: "Google has drawn up detailed plans for the closure of its Chinese search engine and is now '99.9 per cent' certain to go ahead as talks over censorship with the Chinese authorities have reached an apparent impasse, according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking. In a hardening of positions on both sides, the Chinese government also on Friday threw down a direct public challenge to the US search company, ...

I've obtained a copy of the temporary restraining order that Microsoft obtained to shut down the Waledac botnet (which I reported on earlier here). The temporary restraining order is viewable here. If there has been no further legal action, the temporary restraining order expired yesterday. I am working on obtaining access to the court file to confirm whether or not Microsoft has gotten an extension to the order or if there have been any changes, but the court file is behind the PACER paywall...

  Spanish authorities, with the help of private cyber security companies, have identified and arrested three individuals, whose online names are "jonyloleante," aged 30, "netkairo," 31, and "ostiator," 25. The three were identified as the ring-leaders of a massive botnet know as "mariposa." The network was started in 2008 and infected nearly 13 million computers. Over half the Fortune 1000 companies were infiltrated by the botnet, including over 40 major banks. The botnet was present in near...

  This past Monday, an Alexandria, Virginia Federal court granted a request from Microsoft to allow Microsoft to take down tens of thousands of internet addresses that the company claims are linked to harmful hacking activities and botnets, specifically the Waladec botnet. Microsoft claimed the IP addresses listed in the request are involved in spam, virus propagation, and D-DOS attacks (distributed denial of service, an activity aimed at taking a server down by overloading it with countless...

Google's recent cyber-security problems, which lead the company to threaten to pull out of China if the Chinese government refused to lift internet censorship, may have been perpetrated by a few junior college and university students. According to the New York Times, experts investigating the incursion have pointed to the Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanziang Vocational School in the Shandong Province.   A few weeks ago the Jiaotong University won the international "Battle of the Bra...

In what's being labeled the biggest hacking bust in the history of China, police in the Hubei Province arrested three people and seized several computers and servers, a car, and 1.7 million yuan ($250,000). The three arrested were allegedly involved in a web site known as the Black Hawk Safety Net (www.3800hk.com) which sells courses in cybersecurity, aka hacking. According to officials, the site has made around $1 million since it started in 2005. It does not appear that the individuals arre...