SecurityWeek

TAIPEI - (AFP) - Nearly 1,000 civil servants in Taiwan must take classes in cyber security after falling for a trap set up by their employer to test Internet safety, an official said on Wednesday. The government of New Taipei City, near capital Taipei, sent out an email last month which claimed to contain a steamy sex video in order to check how carefully its 6,000 staff were protecting their computers against hacking and virus attacks, she said.

Much of the talk about cybercrime remains focused on East Asia. But according to Trend Micro, it is hackers in Eastern Europe that have actually emerged as more sophisticated.

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Philippine media groups said Tuesday a new law targeting cybercrime could also be used to curb press freedom.

Two women have been given probation and hit with a minor fine for their role in a credit card skimming scam. The two worked at a steakhouse in Alton, Illinois where the scheme gained traction, but were given the lighter sentences for their passive roles. The mastermind behind the operation, a “romantic partner” to one of the women, was sentenced to 57 months in prison last summer.

In August, word spread that after the Senate rejected the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 the Obama administration was considering an executive order that would deal with some of the provisions in the failed bill. Last week, a draft of such an order was leaked to the Web.

PITTSBURGH (AP) — An Ohio man will plead guilty to sending anonymous YouTube threats in which he claimed to have hacked into the University of Pittsburgh's computer system on the heels of a series of unrelated disruptive bomb threats, his attorney told The Associated Press. Brett Hudson will admit he's guilty "and he's going to get on with his life," defense attorney Warner Mariani said.

Cigital announced the release of the fourth version of the Building Security In Maturity Model (BSIMM) study, gathering data from 51 security initiatives at corporations around the world.

On Monday, Google announced that IMAP/SMTP and XMPP would be getting a security boost in the form of OAuth 2.0. The transition comes as the company depreciates older standards (OAuth 1.0a) on the GMail and Google Talk services. Ryan Troll, a member of Google’s Application Security Team, said in a blog post that the changes are part of a long term plan to support additional mechanisms to protect user information.

HONG KONG - Chinese telecom giant Huawei is perplexed at its treatment in the West, with the United States fearful it is a Trojan horse for cyber warfare even as Europe eagerly courts its business. The contrast was stark last week when the private company's elusive founder and chief executive officer, Ren Zhengfei, appeared alongside British Prime Minister David Cameron at the signing of a $2 billion investment deal in London.

FireHost, a Dallas based cloud hosting provider that has made security the focus of its offerings, today announced that it has raised $10 Million in a Series C round of funding. The announcement comes just about a year to the day when the company announced that it raised $10 Million in a Series B funding round last September. 

Putting Business Continuity Plans in Place Now, Means You Won’t Have to Scramble When It’s Time to Trigger Your Disaster Recovery Plan...

In response to reports of a Zero-Day vulnerability targeting all versions of Internet Explorer, with the single exception of Internet Explorer 10, Microsoft has confirmed the issue and offered guidance to customers.

Two Romanian Nationals Plead Guilty to Hacking into and Stealing Payment Card Data from Hundreds of Point of Sale Systems

A new survey by Symantec has uncovered many organizations are struggling with increasingly complexity in the data center.

New Features Niagara Framework 3.7 include Enhanced Security and Built-in Mobile Support Today, Tridium, the Honeywell subsidiary that makes the Niagara Framework, pushed a significant update to its flagship software product.

TDL4, also known as TDSS in some circles, is a Root Kit that targets the MBR (Master Boot Record) and is nearly impossible to remove. At one point, it was responsible for a botnet with more than 4 million hosts, earning the title of indestructible. Now, researchers at Damballa have discovered a new iteration of TDSS, which uses a new command and control (C&C) communication method that is helping it push a new click-fraud initiative.

Journalists in Beijing are being sent malicious email attachments, which would enable a backdoor into their systems. This latest round of attacks on reporters marks the third such incident, and as usual, the government denies all speculation that it may be behind the attacks.

In an effort to get the attention of the university and the media, a group going by the name of NullCrew has published a list of some 4,000 names and a hand full of passwords, said to have been taken from the University of Cambridge’s Press portal. In response, the university has insisted that there has been no breach.

The ongoing investigation into the Flame malware has traced the development of the Flame platform back in 2006.

The Internet is a virtual environment within the physical properties of the infrastructure that enables its existence. It is tied to geography and there are physical linkages to entities such as IP addresses or domain names. However, the logical topology of the networks that own the information space can be quite different.