Editor's News

According to Venafi, more than half of the companies on the Forbes Global 2000 list are still vulnerable to the Heartbleed flaw. This follows the recent data breach at Community Health System which exposed over 4.5 million patients’ personal details, which was reportedly down to the OpenSSL flaw. Richard Cassidy, senior security architect, Alert Logic explained why Heartbleed is still an issue 6 months on. “We know from our own research at Alert Logic that...

The ICO reports that highly sensitive information was insecurely handled by prisons across England and Wales for over a year, leading to a data loss at HMP Erlestoke. The penalty follows the loss of a back up hard drive in May 2013. According to the report, the hard drive contained information about 2,935 prisoners that included ‘details of links to organised crime, health information, history of drug misuse and material about victims and visitors.’ The...

Korea’s Joongang Daily has reported that hackers have accessed 220 million data records of 27 million people. The South Jeolla Provincial Police Agency said they arrested a 24-year-old man, known only by surname Kim, as well as 15 others. Kim is believed to have bought personal data of 220 million people, including the names, resident registration numbers, account names and passwords from a Chinese hacker he met in 2011. He is then thought to have used...

According to Imperva, web attacks originating from Las Vegas increased 130x during conferences Black Hat and Def Con. Where there would typically be 20 attacks originating from Las Vegas per day, during the conferences that number peaked at 2,612. The start of Defcon - which is also the final day of Black Hat – saw the number of attacks hit 1,916 on Aug. 7. On the final day of DefCon the number of detected attacks...

  Fewer than half of security professionals believe that the Target breach has had an impact upon their business.   In a survey conducted at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas this month, 42 per cent of 215 respondents said that the Target breach had a greater impact on their security budgets. 31 per cent said the Target breach had a greater influence on their executives’ security awareness, more than the Snowden leaks or...

Logistics company UPS has admitted that it suffered a breach of user credit card data following a malware intrusion at 51 physical locations.   In a statement and letter to customers, president Tim Davis said that the malware was present at 51 locations of 4,470 franchised center locations throughout 24 states. Davis confirmed that as a response, it has implemented various system enhancements and antivirus updates and it worked with a security firm to eradicate...

The British public's capability to spot and prevent cyber attacks is the next venture for the Cyber Security Challenge.   Working in partnership with GCHQ, a new virtual game will aim to find future cyber defence talent by protecting a threatened, fictional aerospace company "Ebell Technologies" against a hacktivist group.   Featuring fictional hacktivists Flag Day Associates, a group invented for the 2014/2015 competition and recurring throughout the year, “Assignment: Astute Explorer” will give members...

A proposed report requiring reporting of breaches and a standard of cyber defence has been pushed back by a month by the US Department of Defense.   According to Bloomberg, companies that do business with the Defense Department will face new rules requiring them to report computer breaches to the Pentagon and give the Government access to their networks to analyse the attacks. However a report that was to be released on the rules has...

Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has announced his resignation from the board of directors.   Following his decision to resign as CEO in a tear-filled video, Steve Ballmer announced in an open letter to Microsoft that “Microsoft has been my life’s work” and he was proud of that and excited by what I see in front of the company and this leadership team.   He said: “There are challenges ahead but the opportunities are even...

              Deployment of honeypots in public cloud infrastructures around the world has shown that 40 per cent of attacks come from Russia, and 21 per cent of attacks on the US come from within the US itself.   The research of the by Alert Logic has observed the type and frequency of attacks, and found that attacks against the Asia pacific region most frequently originated in the USA (63...