Top 10 Stories

Register - Microsoft had two Twitter accounts and an official blog compromised over the weekend in another embarrassing security incident for the Redmond giant. Attackers claiming to belong to pro-Assad group the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) managed to crack the @MSFTnews and @XboxSupport accounts on Saturday and post various messages hash-tagged “SEA”, according to Mashable.

CNBC - Since Target's original announcement that up to 40 million customer credit and debit card accounts had been hacked, critics have questioned why it took the retailer four days to come clean on the data breach.   Now, for the first time since the security breach was announced on Dec. 19, Target Chairman and CEO Gregg Steinhafel is speaking out. While four days may seem like a long time for consumers to learn their sensitive...

V3 - McAfee got hold of the data from Transport for London (TfL) and found that in total 15,833 mobile phones were handed to its lost property department after being lefts on trains, buses and tubes. To date only 2,308 have been returned, with 13,525 still unclaimed. Even larger sized devices are prone to being lost, with 506 misplaced tablets during the past year, up from just 17 lost tablets in 2009. So far only...

Computer World - Dropbox said Sunday it was making progress in restoring service after the popular file storage service went offline on Friday. As of Sunday afternoon Pacific time, the service said more than 99 percent of users can access their files. But five percent of users were having trouble syncing files from the desktop client, and about 20 percent were having issues with Dropbox's mobile applications.

Security Week - According to Target Chairman and CEO Gregg Steinhafel, point-of-sale (POS) malware was used in the recent attack that compromised millions of credit and debit card account numbers of customers across the country. Steinfhafel told CNBC’s Becky Quick in an interview that malware was used in attacks that compromised the company’s point of sale registers. “While Steinfhafel said the full extent of what transpired is not yet known, what Target does know is that malware...

IT Pro Portal -  Dropbox? Hacked by Anonymous? The news seemed a bit out of place at first, given that we never really knew that the latter had it in for the former. And now, Dropbox representatives have officially emailed out a statement indicating that Dropbox's outage yesterday happened as a byproduct of "internal maintenance." The site wasn't hacked, and user data that was posted to Pastebin as supposed proof of the hack has a...

Reuters - Target Corp and Neiman Marcus are not the only U.S. retailers whose networks were breached over the holiday shopping season last year, according to sources familiar with attacks on other merchants that have yet to be publicly disclosed. Smaller breaches on at least three other well-known U.S. retailers took place and were conducted using similar techniques as the one on Target, according to the people familiar with the attacks. Those breaches have yet to...

BBC - Small businesses have been urged to become "cyber streetwise," in order to avoid the risk of internet attack. An estimated 11 million internet-enabled devices were received as gifts throughout the UK over Christmas. Business security experts said this could put firms at risk if employees failed to take precautions.

Dark Reading - I think most of you'd agree that among the toughest challenges in fighting malware is sorting out what ought to run from what needs to be stopped. Your increasingly sophisticated adversaries hide, run 0-days, and design advanced attacks that evade common detection tools. Sadly, the adversaries will grow only more sophisticated. Future security solutions must do more to keep pace. And to successfully keep pace, we need to build security solutions on strong...

CNEt - A contentious European Union privacy law that would've drastically changed data protection laws for a generation is "dead," according to Google's chief privacy counsel. Google's global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer wrote on his personal blog, "Europe's much-ballyhooed, and much-flawed, proposal to rewrite its privacy laws for the next twenty years collapsed."