SecurityWeek

There is a saying in the InfoSec world – you can’t patch human stupidity. It isn’t hard to prove that statement depending on the situation, but a new account on Twitter is making the task a simple one. The account, @NeedADebitCard, is re-tweeting people who are openly declaring their intent to share the wealth (what little of it there is) by posting pictures of their debit and credit cards for all to see.

MasterCard and Deutsche Telekom on Monday announced a partnership in Europe designed to enable Deutsche Telekom’s 93 million mobile customers across Europe to use their mobile phones as an easy and secure way to pay.

Twitter, the ever popular, privacy respecting social network, released their first transparency report this week, after taking a cue from Google. The report isn’t glowing, but it is a solid start and another view of how a major Internet portal deals with protecting a user’s rights.

According to research from Symantec and Sophos, the Blackhole exploit kit has been upgraded with some new features recently. The latest revision includes a payload that targets an unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft XML Core Services , and new JavaScript that addresses propagation issues.

Sourcefire CEO John Burris Takes Medical Leave of AbsenceCybersecurity solutions provider Sourcefire, Inc. today said that its Chief Executive Officer, John Burris, has taken a medical leave of absence to undergo a series of treatments for colon cancer.

According to newly released data from International Data Corporation (IDC), security appliance vendors enjoyed strong continued growth during the first quarter of this year, as evidenced by recent numbers coming from the technology market research firm.

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.