Displaying items by tag: Data Breach

Tuesday, 31 December 2013 10:30

Retail chain Target attacked by hackers

One of the largest US retail chains, Target, founded in 1902 admitted that unknown attackers stolen encrypted PINs from their system. Alienated data contained the names of customers, credit and debit card and CCV numbers that are used to activate the card on Target's webpage.

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The threat of a data breach is one that every company faces and it is also an eventuality that they all know can happen at any time. The number of daily attempt to penetrate corporate security is staggering as is the number of successful attack where at least some data is taken. It is for this reason that we still a confused when companies want to move to a cloud based or subscription style software agreement. Once all of that billing information is stored in a single spot (even multiple data centers) it becomes a very big target. Adobe has found that out the hard way as they are now reporting a breach that lost the information for approximately 2.9 Million users and source code for Cold Fusion and Acrobat.

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Pirate Pay founder Gottfird Svartholm has managed to successfully appeal the two year sentence imposed after he was found guilty of hacking Logica, a Swedish IT company (as well as aggravated fraud and attempted aggravated fraud). Although throughout the trial Svartholm maintained his innocence the court (Nacka District) still felt he was responsible for at least hacking the IT company. Svartholm was also found guilty of hacking a local bank (Nordea). The court sentenced him to two years in prison.

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Wednesday, 21 August 2013 20:21

League of Legends accounts in danger

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On the pages of the popular MOBA title League of Legends warning appeared which states that the date of the players from the  North American servers are in danger. According to the statement, unknown perpetrators have come up with user names, e-mail address, masked passwords and some full names.

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Data security (and privacy) has been in the news a lot lately as if it is a new and troubling issue. In fact this has been a major topic of discussion going back to the mid-1980s when the first consumer available modems hit the market. This started the practice of war dialing where phone phreaks would dial random numbers to see if any would answer to their computers. One of the more famous phone phreaks is none other than Steve Wozniak, Co-Founder of Apple Computers. These are the guys that pioneered the hacking scene (and in some cases the piracy scene as well). Back then security was primitive and usually consisted nothing more than a login and a password. Fast forward more than 30 years and the security of some places is little better than what it was back in the war dialing days.

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Today (Sunday July 21 2013) Apple officially admitted that someone had hacked their developer site. The notification came out as a warning that some information including names, addresses and email information might have been accessed. What we find interesting is that this announcement comes on the heels of a multi-day outage to the same site. It looks like Apple might have known about the breach earlier and not told anyone until they confirmed that user data was compromised (in which case they might have been compelled to). This is not exactly what you want to hear from a company that prides themselves on the security and safety of their operating system AND their ecosystem.

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Security is a huge issue and has always been one ever since the first person decided they wanted to protect what they owned. Through the centuries the art of security has evolved and a multitude of inventions have blossomed on the scene to help us keep our property safe and secure. Once the data age started we had new concerns and our fertile minds came up with new and more creative ways to protect our new digital property. These two separate (yet dependent) fields are broken down into physical and digital security. The problem is that neither of these are effective unless we apply human security. This is the practice of securing people (humans) against being the largest security hole in any network or location.

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Over the last few years we have followed the sorry state of cyber security in both corporate and governmental systems and have always been surprised at the solutions that they have presented. For some reason these groups want to remove responsibility from themselves for making sure their data (which in some cases is your data) is secure. This lack of corporate responsibility has led to misguided bills, acts and other nonsense that will still not do anything to stem the tide of security breaches. One of the most famous examples of this is QinetiQ.

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In 2012 there was more than 1 data breach per day and of these 365 plus breaches about 80% managed to get some sort of data. This is a pretty scary number when you think about it, but it actually pales by comparison to the number of personal accounts that are compromised due to poor security, weak passwords, and malware designed to steal passwords. So what do you do to help prevent this? A simple answer is to just not have any online accounts so there is no chance of getting your account compromised. However, we know that this is not really a viable solution so it is fortunate that many companies are finally turning to two-step authentication to help mitigate this type of attack.

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We have two additional hacks to report this morning. The first was a little shocking as it has been learned that nVidia’s Developer Zone form was under attack. Although details of this attack are small it does appear that nVidia recognized that there was an attack on the forum and shut it down to prevent additional attack. However nVidia warns that the hashed passwords for the forum may have been accessed. Right now the forum is still down with only a canned message in its place warning users about the attack and advising them to change their passwords especially any passwords that might be identical across multiple sites.

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