Online intrusion risks large identity cache
83285
com October 20, 2004, 5:36 PM PT. Cyber threats, chiefly viruses like NetSky and Sasser, make security an ongoing concern as it holds steady over software infrastructure as the third top priority.
163563
The always provocative Brad Templeton, who hung out with a large cadre of geeks at the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW, or IIW2007) last week, has some cautions about new identity systems, even if they are all &quot;user-centric&quot;. These cautions lie in a paradox: &quot;The easier it is to give somebody ID information, the more often it will be done. And the easier it is to give ID information, the more palatable it is to ask for, or demand it.&quot; The italics are his.  Here he hits on the problem of market power asymmetries (vendors strong, customers weak) that have been with us for the whole Industrial Age, and are with us still. I think we have a way to overcome those, and that Brad's Paradox may provide exactly the conceptual hurdle we need to see before we can make progress. \
758171
Multifactor authentication is all the rage these days, thanks to increasingly sophisticated trojans and phishing attacks and even rootkits aimed at stealing passwords and sensitive data. High-stakes online crime has even spurred financial services companies and some enterprises to consider new, "risk-based authentication" solutions, which examine behavioral patterns and session characteristics to identify rogue users.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
337989
A customer filed a $54 million lawsuit against Best Buy for losing an $1100 laptop she took in for service. The reason, exposure to identity theft.  It's about time vendors were forced to recognize the value of customers' data. I recall how the chief genius at the Apple store in Emeryville complained that they would have to eat the cost of the drive in a deal they made with the manufacturer. Someday they'll have a clue that the data on most drives is worth far more than the hardware, and that their potential liability, if the data ends up in the hands of an identity thief, is also much greater.
234398
QUESTION: What is the best approach to protecting me from ID theft and related activities? Will a software package work best, or must I go to a hardware firewall?
602929
(Source: Symantec) Join this webcast to learn how you can maximize uptime of your e-mail infrastructure, dynamically manage storage growth without impacting user performance, quickly recover from data or application failure, and protect from the worst case - a complete site disaster.
221404
Millions of computer users are at risk of attack because flaws in the way Windows handles some images.
244754
IT security vendors and analysts reported an increase in the number of cyberattacks being targeted at specific companies doing business online. An ongoing denial-of-service attack against payment processor Authorize.Net is a prime example.
612363
(InfoWorld) - Computers belonging to the U.S. government, contractors, and companies in the transportation industry were hit by a targeted computer attack in July that yielded password information for hundreds of Internet and intranet Web sites, a computer security vendor said Tuesday. The malicious code behind the attacks was first detected by computer intrusion prevention vendor Prevx on July 5. In total, the criminals were able to cull 200MB ofÂ information from about 500 computers, including password and login data, Prevx said. All but one of the computers was located in the U.S., and many of the computers that were infected were associated with air transportation, according to Mel Morris, CEO of Prevx. "This was a well-coordinated attack by someone wanting to get information on the related sites." PCs at the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), American Airlines, and DOT contractor Booz Allen Hamilton all were compromised, Morris said. If DOT systems were compromised, the department is unaware of the situation. "We haven't found any record of a problem," a DOT spokeswoman said Tuesday. Prevx obtained a sample of the Trojan used in the attacks on Friday of last week. By Saturday, it had tracked down a Web site, hosted by YahooÂ in Sunnyvale, California, where information from the compromised PCs was dropped. Because Prevx found a "massive amount" of job applications on the Web site used by the criminals, the company believes that victims may have downloaded the malicious software while thinking they were applying for a job. That Web site, which had probably been hacked by the criminals behind the scam, was shut down on Tuesday, Morris said. It hosted about 200MB of password information, and log-files on the server showed the IP addresses of the infected PCs. Victims of the Trojan, called Win32.PSWSteal.Gen , are told that their hard drive has been encrypted and that they will need to pay $300 to for a decryption tool. Morris believes this extortion threat is actually a ruse designed to conceal the attacker's true motivation: data gathering. "We think the ransomware is to point anyone investigating this down the wrong alley," he said. Morris said he is troubled that such a high percentage of the infected PCs are related to the transportation sector, which has been the target of terrorist attacks. "When we reverse-engineered the IP addresses of those computers, we couldn't believe that this was a daisy chain that led to government-associated sites and to other defense contractors, and to American Airlines," Morris said. "This was a very highly targeted attack." Criminals have increasingly turned to this type of targeted attack in order to collect and eventually sell data from corporations and government agencies, said Marcus Sachs, deputy director of research group SRI International's Computer Science Laboratory. But while Prevx's list of compromised organizations is "kind of scary," it's still hard to characterize what was motivating the attack, Sachs said. "I wouldn't necessarily associate it with terrorists," he said.
64522
Identity theft, thanks mainly to the growth of the Internet, is epidemic. Can it be stopped?
389751
A cache of personal data derived mainly from U.S.-based PC users has been found lurking on a server in France along with various malware tools, and some experts suspect that it was stockpiled by an online theft ring specializing in financial crime.
538641
Worried about catching viruses, spyware, or other malicious software while surfing the Web?
5949
Handling of images could allow an attacker to take over your PC.
164552
Blog: Although rare, a sophisticated attacker could perform a man-in-the-middle attack using Google Desktop.
118934
By Anonymous  WAN lessons learned  Plus: How to hide your online footprints.
148612
Attackers can trick browsers into releasing password information.
220329
LOS ANGELES -- California university officials have warned nearly 600,000 students and faculty that they might be exposed to identity theft following incidents where computer hard drives loaded with their private information were lost or hacked into.