SecurityWeek

A new whitepaper from McAfee takes a look at the emergence of hacktivism and the implications of how digital protest movements may evolve in the future. The report, titled ‘Hacktivism: Cyberspace has become the new medium for political voices’, was authored by Francois Paget, a senior malware research engineer at McAfee Labs in France. The paper traces hacktivism from the first uses of the word to the people launching politically-motivated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks under the Anonymous label.

Anonymous Looks to Save the Planet by Targeting ExxonMobil, Shell and BP Last week, and continuing into the weekend, Anonymous targeted ExxonMobil and claimed to have compromised company data during Op SaveTheArctic. The attack was in response to environmental concerns, and it isn’t the first time Exxon has come under the gun with regards to the faceless hacking collective.

On June 24, with little fanfare, Stuxnet died. The malware exposed as being a government project aimed at slowing Iran’s nuclear intiatives, stopped replicating. Despite a reported link to a plant shutdown in Iran, the state run media called Stuxnet a failure.

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have demonstrated how the GPS signals of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), or drone, can be hijacked by an outside source.

Ending weeks of speculation, Dell and Quest Software today announced they have entered into a definitive agreement, under which Dell would acquire Quest, a provider IT management software solutions, in a deal valued at approximately $2.4 billion.

For many years network security has taken something of a primarily reactive, top-down mentality to dealing with threats. For example, when a new malicious widget emerges, then the security industry spins up new anti-widget products to stop them. These technologies obviously have their place, and few of us would consider securing a network without IPS and anti-virus capabilities. However, most organizations lack a comparable bottoms-up strategy to proactively identify all traffic and determine if it is appropriate.

According to a recently released report coming from the DHS-managed Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT), U.S. companies that operate control systems associated with critical infrastructure have experienced a spike in what ICS-CERT calls “cyber incidents” in recent years.

Ixia To Acquire BreakingPoint Systems for $160 Million in Cash Deal

Kaspersky Lab Discovers New Mac OS X Backdoor Variant Used in Targeted AttacksResearchers from Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab today said they have discovered a new APT campaign that is using a new Mac OS X backdoor variant targeted at Uyghur activists.

As cybercriminals crank out massive amounts of malware on a daily basis, identifying, analyzing and classifying malware is a challenge, and one that needs to be met using automation. This is nothing new for traditional anti-virus vendors, but something mobile security firms are still developing tools for.This week, mobile security vendor NQ Mobile said that it has devised a new way to detect mobile threats without relying on known malware samples and their signatures.

Using data taken from raw application traffic within some 2,000 organizations worldwide, the semi-annual Application Usage and Risk Report from Palo Alto Networks shows that streaming media, P2P applications, and social networking are sucking the corporate bandwidth away from other areas where bandwidth and availability are a must.

A Higher Education Student Database is an Identity Thief’s Dream Come True...No more fertile ground for security breaches exists in the United States than our colleges and universities. The confluence of enormous stores of identity data, atmospheres of freedom of information, and ready-made teams of socially motivated hackers chosen from the best and brightest our country has to offer make this claim close to a certainty.

In the wake of a breach at Wyndham Worldwide that has resulted in a lawsuit against the company from the FTC, questions have emerged about why there was no SEC filing from the hotel and resort chain – given the guidance and recommendations published by the commission last year.

Web Application Security gurus, WhiteHat Security, released a report this week that examines the severity and duration of Web application security related vulnerabilities discovered in 2011. When the numbers are stacked against those from similar reports published since 2007, the number of major vulnerabilities has fallen dramatically.

According to a study from Symantec, information is a pricy asset within an organization, costing businesses $1.1 trillion annually. Yet, the same organizations paying such a high cost to manage their data often have problems protecting it.