Tag Archives: hackers

In a world where the only thing standing between us and the spammers, phishers and hackers is a little piece of tunneling security that keeps IT admins dreaming about warm and snuggly things, the idea of that security being breached …

Spam-ready tablets off the shelves? Zombie PCs out of the box? Testifying before U.S. Congress this week, a top official for the Department of Homeland Security said that technology being imported into the country is sometimes known to contain preloaded …

In what surely must be the third sign of the pending apocalypse, video game industry icon, Sega Corp. is hacked for data on 1.3 million of its users. And just when you thought the world hadn’t gotten any stranger, hacktivist …

In what’s quickly becoming (or has already become) something of a joke ending with a simple punch line – ‘Sony’ – another hack attack saw the entertainment giant scrambling to quietly warn users that another breach in its security, this time of Sony BMG Music’s website, had occurred. The announcement seemed like it came from the Bizarro world, considering that over at Playstation.com, splashed in prominence on the main page is the announcement of Sony’s ‘Welcome Back’ program, designed to mollify irritated users whose access to the Playstation Network and Qriocity had been down for a month.

While it may be premature to declare this the Year of the Cyber Terrorist, it certainly seems like these attacks are becoming more frequent and more severe. Perhaps it would be more accurate to dub this the ‘Era of the Cyber Terrorist.’ Bill Davidow at Forbes suggests that World War III, if it ever occurs, will be fought on the battlefield of cyber space. Tony Bradley of PCWorld takes an interesting perspective in his article, Lockheed-Martin Attack Signals New Era of Cyber Espionage, suggesting that the era of cyber espionage is in full bloom. The attack on Lockheed Martin, Bradley writes, “seems at face value like either a state-sponsored attack, or an attack by well-funded hackers with the intent to market whatever information can be extracted internationally to other governments.”

In the most recent spam scam to assault Facebook, users are being greeted with a message advising them to ‘verify’ their account, seemingly a noble act of spam prevention and surely not spam itself, right? Not so fast.

Amidst all the confusion, news of recent security breaches at some very large companies may be the warning that IT people everywhere have been looking for – the ammunition they need to remind their bosses that being the first to jump off a cliff before checking for water below isn’t the best way to embrace innovation. The recent woes felt by Sony Corporation, Epsilon and Amazon serve as that useful warning.

the issue has turned into something of a nightmare, both for Sony and the 78 million members of the services. Hours turned into days, days into a week. What was very quietly sold as an outage turned into the worst possible outcome: three days into the outage, Sony finally announced that the service failure was in fact the product of “an external intrusion.”

Security breaches at an outsource provider expose customer email address for hundreds of companies.

In what appears to be a continuation of deliberate attacks by unknown factions, several media outlets report that the websites of nearly 40 South Korean agencies sustained a cyber attack on March 4, 2011. News agencies have reported that several …