SecurityWeek

SAN FRANCISCO - Google on Friday reported unexplained disruptions to its service in China. "We've checked and there is nothing wrong on our end," a Google spokeswoman told AFP. An online tool that tracks outages or disruptions to the California-based Internet giant's services showed online traffic in China plummet mid-day.

WASHINGTON - Lockheed Martin sacked its president and chief executive-in-waiting Christopher Kubasik Friday over an unauthorized "close personal relationship" with an employee of the company. The company said it took the action after an ethics investigation confirmed the "improper conduct" which violated the powerful defense contractor's code of ethics.

LONDON - Britain's tax department on Friday confirmed it was investigating missing data after a newspaper reported that HSBC bank was being probed over offshore accounts in Jersey used by criminals. "We can confirm we have received the data and we are studying it," HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) said in a statement. "We receive information from a very wide range of sources which we use to ensure the tax rules are being respected.

The infamous Stuxnet virus infected Chevron’s network in 2010, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The oil giant told the paper that they believe the infection was not intended, noting that the government wasn’t aware of how far the infection spread.

MoneyGram International Inc., a company that provides money transfer services, has reached a deal with the U.S. Department of Justice and will pay $100 million for aiding and abetting wire fraud and failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program.

Sendmail this week announced the release of the Sentrion Rogue Email Application Control (REAC) appliance, a new offering designed to address the security and compliance needs of organizations migrating email-generating systems and applications to the cloud. Details on REAC were announced at their annual International Messaging Infrastructure Summit in Washington, D.C.

Big data installations often have almost no security built-in to protect the data being collected and stored, and there are very few "relevant and usable security tools," according to a recent whitepaper.

With more than $32 billion in reported cyber-security losses in the U.S. alone last year (and with unreported losses likely to be equally huge), there should be no doubt that cyber crime is a serious problem.

The latest version of Splunk's big data search and analytics platform offers security professionals quicker insights and intelligence gleaned from large volume of data.

The lawsuit against South Carolina followingthe recent Department of Revenue data breach has been expanded to include data security company Trustwave.

Microsoft is prepping fixes for 19 security vulnerabilities for this month's Patch Tuesday. The vulnerabilities are stretched out across six bulletins, four of which are rated critical. Those four address 13 bugs affecting Windows, Internet Explorer and the .NET Framework.

Kidnap and ransom can be a profitable business in the world of computers.

Dell SecureWorks has launched a new suite of services focused on helping organizations defend against advanced persistent threats (APTs).

Researchers at Group-IB have discovered a new vulnerability in Adobe Reader that is being sold on criminal forums. The moderate price, $30,000 - $50,000, likely reflects some of the limitations the vulnerability has to cope with. According to Group-IB’s initial disclosure, the vulnerability is being sold to a limited circle of criminals, and has already been added to custom versions of the Blackhole Exploit Kit.

SAN FRANCISCO - Some people logging onto Twitter on Thursday were greeted with word that their passwords were reset due to concerns their accounts may have been breached by hackers. The San Francisco-based one-to-many text messaging service said the routine security precaution was accidentally applied to more users than intended. Twitter did not specify the number of accounts involved.