Europe must reboot its fledgling domain name to avoid a system crash, critics say, after alleged missteps allowed cybersquatters to stockpile trademarks for auction.
...Diana Wallis, a British liberal European Parliament member on the body's legal affairs committee, has asked the Commission to give a "full explanation of how the .eu domain allocation has been handled."
"If the scale of the abuse is anything like what appears to have taken place, this will represent a major EU scandal and commissioners will need to be brought to account," she said. more»
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Tuesday that the United States is "under cyber-attack virtually all the time, every day" and that the Defense Department plans to more than quadruple the number of cyber experts it employs to ward off such attacks. In an interview for an upcoming edition of 60 Minutes, CBS News anchor Katie Couric asked Gates about the nation's cyber security after hackers stole specifications from a $300 billion fighter jet development program as well as other sensitive information... more»
The latest issue of Policy Review from the Hoover Institution, a public policy research center -- focused on advanced study of politics, economics, and political economy -- has an essay titled eWMDs – electronic weapons of mass destruction. The Policiy Review readers are warned that botnets should be considered a serious security problem and that "cyber attacks present a grave new security vulnerability for all nations and must be urgently addressed." more»
Just days before the Conficker worm is set to contact its controllers for new instructions, security researchers have discovered a flaw in the worm that makes it much easier for users to detect infected PCs. Tillmann Werner and Felix Leder, members of the Honeynet Project, an all-volunteer organization that monitors Internet threats, have discovered that Conficker-infected PCs return unusual errors when sent specially crafted Remote Procedure Call (RPC) messages, according to preliminary information they have posted on the Web. more»
Finjan’s Malicious Code Research Center has released a report on the latest developments of today’s Crimeware business environment. "With the transition of cybercrime from amateur hacker attacks to highly professional cybercrime business models," says the report. "We see that the organizational structure of cybercriminals reflects this trend. Individual hackers operating independently or groups of hackers with common goals have been replaced by hierarchical cybercrime organizations were each cybercriminal has his own well-defined role and reward system. The current cybercrime organizations bear an uncanny resemblance to organized crime organizations such as the Mafia." more»
A new phishing survey released by the Anti-Phishing Work Group (APWG) reveals that the longevity of phishing Web sites dropped by 25 percent over the last year. The survey has also revealed that a single criminal syndicate dubbed "Avalanche" was responsible for nearly one quarter of all phishing attacks in the first half of 2009. Indications are that the gang is continuing to claim a larger proportion of all detected phishing attacks. more»
Cybercrime is likely to wreak as much havoc as the credit crisis in the coming years if international regulation is not improved, some of the world's top crime experts said on Wednesday. Damage caused by cybercrime is estimated at $100 billion annually, said Kilian Strauss, of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). more»
Internet attackers could gain control of water treatment plants, natural gas pipelines and other critical utilities because of a vulnerability in the software that runs some of those facilities, security researchers reported Wednesday. Experts with Boston-based Core Security Technologies, who discovered the deficiency, said there's no evidence anyone else found or exploited the flaw. Citect Pty. Ltd., which makes the program called CitectSCADA, patched the hole last week, five months after Core Security first notified Citect of the problem. more»
A committee of cybersecurity experts today released a 96-page report detailing recommendations for the next administration on how to combat the growing number of criminal attacks aimed at government networks. Creating a National Office for Cybersecurity within the White House is chief among the report's recommendations. A top cybersecurity official would help coordinate a national strategy among agencies, and would also work with the private sector to boost defenses against hackers, according to the report. more»
Today X-Force, IBM's security research and development arm, released its 2008 Midyear Trend Statistics report that indicates cyber-criminals are adopting new automation techniques and strategies that allow them to exploit vulnerabilities much faster than ever before. The new tools are being implemented on the Internet by organized criminal elements, and at the same time public exploit code published by researchers are putting more systems, databases and ultimately, people at risk of compromise. more»
Anti-spam and malware enforcement agency ACMA reports on this (shocking high?) figure. Keep this up and ca. 50% of the Australian population is infected within a year. I remember a presentation from Sweden only a few years ago, that there were only a little over a thousand infected pc's in Sweden. (Reactions were: that can't be correct. Too low) Do you know what the numbers are for your country and maybe more importantly what your government and/or Industry is/are doing about it? more»
A Romanian hacker site said on Wednesday it was able to breach the website of Helsinki-based security firm F-Secure just as it had gained access to the sites of two other security companies earlier in the week. F-Secure is "vulnerable to SQL Injection plus Cross Site Scripting," an entry on the HackersBlog site said. "Fortunately, F-Secure doesn't leak sensitive data, just some statistics regarding past virus activity." more»
China is actively conducting cyber espionage as a warfare strategy and has targeted U.S. government and commercial computers, according to a new report from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. "China's current cyber operations capability is so advanced, it can engage in forms of cyber warfare so sophisticated that the United States may be unable to counteract or even detect the efforts," according to the annual report recently delivered to Congress. more»
Small- and medium-sized businesses are in denial about the threat posed by cyberattacks, security software firm McAfee concluded in a study published this week. While most small- and medium-sized companies believe that they operate under cybercriminals' radar, the study found that one-in-five firms have been attacked. The survey -- which polled 500 companies with 1,000 employees or less -- found that for every eight firms, only ten employees were dedicated to managing the businesses' information-technology systems. more»
The NATO Consultation, Command and Control Agency (NC3A) has announced the award of a contract for upgrading the NATO cyber defence capabilities. The award to private industrial companies will enable the already operating NATO Computer Incident Response Capability (NCIRC) to achieve full operational capability by the end of 2012. At approximately 58 million Euro, it represents NATO's largest investment to date in cyber defence. more»
