SecurityWeek

After details began to emerge on the scope of US government spying when classified documents were leaked by Edward Snowden, many US technology companies have been put in a tough position with their customers.

The Long Tail of Data Breaches

GENEVA - The mass expansion of Internet domain names could cause havoc for the defense of trademarks in cyberspace, the UN's intellectual property body warned on Monday. "We have this extraordinary expansion that is going on," said Francis Gurry, head of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), which oversees global rules against cybersquatting.

IT security vendor Sophos has made several updates to its Unified Threat Management solution, Sophos UTM.

PARIS - NATO said several of its websites were targeted in a "significant" cyber attack on Saturday that was claimed by Ukrainian hackers in what appeared to be the latest bout of virtual warfare linked to the country's crisis.

GENEVA - The United States defended its controls on mass surveillance on Friday before a UN watchdog body amid a sweeping review of Washington's record on civil and political rights.

WASHINGTON  - [UPDATE] The US government announced Friday it was giving up its key role overseeing the Internet's technical operations, handing over those functions to "the global multi-stakeholder community." The move "marks the final phase of the privatization" of the management of the Internet domain name system, said a statement from the US Commerce Department.

SINGAPORE - Singapore's central bank said Thursday it will regulate "intermediaries" for the Bitcoin virtual currency to prevent them from being used for money laundering and terrorist financing.

Mobile security firm Lookout, Inc. announced on Thursday that Jim Dolce has taken the role as the CEO of the company, replacing Founder John Hering. Dolce comes to the mobile security firm from Akamai Technologies where he was a senior executive selling cloud services to mobile network operators.

HANOVER - European IT security firms have flocked to the world's biggest high-tech fair with hopes of benefiting from the fallout from shock revelations of mass US and British spying. Exactly a year ago, Chancellor Angela Merkel vaunted her new, ultra-secure Smartphone at the opening of the same fair, the CeBIT, in the northern city of Hanover.

WASHINGTON - Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday he had called President Barack Obama to complain that the US government is undermining confidence in the Internet with vast, secret surveillance programs.

Two security researchers uncovered vulnerabilities affecting a SCADA product that can be potentially used to compromise operations at critical infrastructure companies.

Lockheed Martin, the largest provider of IT services, systems integration, and training to the U.S. Government, said Wednesday that it would acquire a privately held Industrial Defender, a provider of cyber security solutions for control systems in the oil and gas, utility and chemical industries.

HANOVER - Internet users may before long have a secure solution to the modern plague of passwords, in which they can use visual patterns or even their own body parts to identify themselves.

The Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) announced on Thursday that it will conduct monthly cyber threat briefings in partnership with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and will warn organizations when HITRUST’s Cyber Threat Intelligence and Incident Coordination Center (C3) identifies high probability and impact cyber threats targeted at the healthcare industry.

Researchers at Core Security uncovered a set of serious vulnerabilities affecting Oracle VirtualBox that can be targeted to remotely execute code. VirtualBox is a virtualization software package for x86 and AMD64/Intel64-based computers. Among other capabilities, VirtualBox allows guest machines to use the host machine's GPU to render 3D graphics based on OpenGL or Direct3D APIs.

Prolexic Technologies and Arbor Networks both issued warnings to organizations this week about the increased threat of NTP amplification DDoS attacks.

Researchers at Sucuri have discovered an attack abusing a commonly-used feature of WordPress to launch a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.