Cyber Crime

Daily deals site LivingSocial has become the latest high-profile site to fall victim to hackers, after an attack accessed information for 50 million accounts last week.

Adrian Price, Head of Information Security at Britain’s Ministry of Defence, suggested that governments should devote 20% of their budget to protecting the nation’s data – a sum worth billions more than that currently allocated in countries such as the UK itself.

Twitter is said to be testing new security systems in the wake of a false Tweet from an official Associated Press account which sent stock markets tumbling in America.

Half of British adults use the same password across all the websites they access, according to telecoms regulator Ofcom. The data comes from a survey of 1805 adults aged 16 and up. The report, Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes Report 2013, found that 55% of adult internet users admitted they used the same password for

Most cyber attacks are simple and predictable, relying on basic tactics and preventable employee errors, according to Verizon’s annual Data Breach Investigations Report. The problem is made worse by the fact that companies often take months or even years to detect such breaches.

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) passes the U.S. House despite privacy concerns and the threat of presidential veto.

A quarter of PCs around the world have no antimalware software, according to Microsoft’s latest Security Intelligence Report.

China and the U.S. have agreed to work together on cyber security, with the two countries setting up a working group to deal with the issue, U.S Secretary of State John Kerry said on Saturday in Beijing.

An Oregon farm products company is suing its own bank to recover losses after a phishing attack saw $223,500 transferred to accounts in the Ukraine over a period of three days in 2010.

Technology companies including Cisco and IBM are backing an Open Group programme to protect computer hardware from threats such as spyware added to components in the supply chain.

60,000 Android apps were removed from Google’s Play app store this February. Categories such as personalization (ringtone apps) were targeted heavily, with 12,277 deletions.

A new Global Center for Cyber Security at the University of Oxford will coordinate international work on cyber threats and cyber security. The Center will receive £500,000 ($766,000) in UK government funding every year.

Utility companies have been warned not to share information such as email addresses on company websites, after a spear-phishing attack on an American electricity company.

More than half of British companies could be at risk of cyber attack, after a survey found that IT departments had not begun the process of migrating from Windows XP- with just a year left before Microsoft stops offering support for the ageing OS.

Employees bringing their own devices to work is a security headache for most companies – even, it seems, the U.S. military. A report issued by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Inspector General last week pinpointed serious security failings around 14,000 commercial devices used by soldiers and civilians.

British cyber security experts from intelligence services such as MI5 are to join forces with 160 top British firms to defend against cyber attacks.

Aleksandr Matrosov reveals changes in banking Trojan Carberp relating to Java/Spy.Banker (AgentX.jar) and gaining remote access using legitimate software as backdoor components.