Cyber Crime

Hit movies such as Man of Steel and World War Z have been used as bait to lure victims to spam pages on sharing site Slideshare, according to a report in The Register this week.

The source code for banking malware Carberp has been released online – raising the possibility a new wave of attacks using variants of the sophisticated Trojan.

More people will be enjoying more digital devices on holiday trips this year than ever before, so we’ve rounded up the top tips for protecting your technology on the road, so you can enjoy a safer, less stressful vacation.

Blizzard, makers of the hit online game World of Warcraft, issued a security alert today after a spate of unauthorized logins and player reports of “money laundering” scams.

An investigation by a British talk radio station has shone light on the hackers who spy on young girls via webcams on compromised PCs.

Many companies are unprepared for data breaches and hacking incidents – and the percentage of companies without any form of crisis response plan has actually grown in the past year, says consulting firm Protiviti.

A simulated cyber attack with the Hollywood-esque title Quantum Dawn 2 will bombard the defenses of American banks on June 28 – in an exercise designed to test how Wall Street would endure a sustained hi-tech assault.

The British government has launched the first stage of a £4 million ($6.1 million) campaign to educate consumers and small businesses about the dangers of cyber crime.

Hackers could remotely attack security cameras commonly used in banks and prisons – and either spy on secure facilities or replace “real” video feeds with fakes, according to a U.S. security expert.

Microsoft has said that it has “liberated” two million PCs worldwide from Citadel botnets after an action on June 5 which targeted 1,400 networks.

Cyber attacks are damaging the world economy, a former White House official has warned, and leading economies need to put aside political differences to deal with the threat.

Google claims to have spotted and disrupted several phishing campaigns in Iran – attempts to compromise tens of thousands of email accounts in the run-up to the country’s presidential elections this Friday.

Banks should look to spam emails and their own server errors as a source of information, says Nicholas Scott of National Australia Bank (NAB), speaking at the RSA Conference Asia-Pacific in Singapore.

British Prime Minister David Cameron has been warned that telecoms equipment made by Chinse firm Huawei should be tested by security services to protect against cyber attacks.

Microsoft and the FBI have broken up a large portion of the Citadel botnet – a network which had stolen $500 million from bank accounts in 90 countries around the world by installing keylogger software on five million machines.

Silicon Valley technology firms should take the lead in defending the private sector against cyber attacks, says Paul Rosenzweig, a former Department of Homeland Security official, now founder of Red Branch Consulting.

Cybercriminals are using online car auctions and photo-sharing services to dupe victims into downloading malware, the FBI has warned. Once infected, the victims are led to fake websites to buy cars – and when they pay up, the criminals vanish.

The free open-source content management system Drupal has reset all Drupal.org passwords after unknown attackers gained access to user account data including usernames, email addresses and hashed passwords.

As an earlier article here noted, the recent report from the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property shows a great deal of concern about the “scale of international theft of American intellectual property” which it estimates to be “hundreds of billions of dollars per year.” However, there’s also been a certain amount of