attack

I hope Global Payments doesn't strain itself patting its own back for containing a massive breach that occurred on its watch.

The company, which processes credit, debit, and gift card transactions between merchants, banks, and consumers, let a staggering 1.5 million credit card numbers get out in the open as a result of a still-to-be determined attack on its system. Yet it has barely shown any signs of contrition.

Most companies would have shown a bit of remorse for what has happened, but Global Payments has struck an almost self-congratulatory tone for how it identified the problem, alerted … Read more

Just days after watchdog group Reporters Without Borders named Iran as one of the "Enemies of the Internet," the BBC is now claiming to be the victim of a cyber-attack possibly perpetrated by the Iranian authorities.

The news source says that two of its satellite feeds into Iran were jammed earlier this month coinciding with a denial-of-service attack in which some parts of the BBC's e-mail and Internet services were unavailable. The director-general of the BBC Mark Thompson will be giving a speech to the Royal Television Society shortly, in which he plans to explain how the … Read more

Mark Jacob's MJ Registry Watcher is a very simple yet effective tool for automatically monitoring your Windows Registry for changes (especially unauthorized changes) and alerting you to the change, and even preventing it from happening. It polls your registry and files every few seconds, looking for changes to your startup files, registry keys and values, and other places that Trojans and rootkits target. RegWatcher also hooks the registry, which means it intercepts commands and blocks those that pose a threat, simultaneously issuing an audible alert.

RegWatcher is portable freeware that needs no installation. The download includes a lot of … Read more

Anonymous continued its ongoing attack on agricultural biotech giant Monsanto today by publishing an outdated database of the company's material. This is the newest in a barrage of strikes from hackers aligned with Anonymous who operate under the "AntiSec" banner.

In a statement posted with the database on a Pastebin site, the hacktivist group wrote it was aware that exposing the database would not do much harm to Monsanto but warned it would continue to target the company for what it sees as wrong.

"Your continued attack on the worlds food supply, as well as the … Read more

In an effort to quickly and efficiently map the roughly 5,000 automated external defibrillators (AEDs) in public areas of Philadelphia, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine recently launched a contest to award $10,000 to the team or person who finds the most.

With the six-week contest, which kicked off in late January, nearing its March 13 deadline, researchers are already planning to conduct a similar, nationwide challenge.

AEDs can save the lives of those suffering cardiac arrests via electric shocks, particularly if used in the first minutes following the onset of the attack. … Read more

A researcher plans to demonstrate an attack on a smartphone at the RSA security conference this week that starts with social engineering via a text message and leads to a malicious Web link that triggers a browser exploit and silently downloads a Trojan.

"It's a demo of a new attack vector on mobile, using a Remote Access Tool" called Nickispy, which showed up a few months ago in China, said Dmitri Alperovitch, formerly of McAfee Labs who is chief technology officer at a brand new startup called CrowdStrike. "No one has publicly demonstrated an end-to-end attack … Read more

The idyllic byways of the next-generation IPv6 Internet now suffer an affliction previously limited to the mainstream IPv4 Internet: distributed denial-of-service attacks.

And worse, the still-immature IPv6 network is being caught with its pants down when it comes to repelling the DDoS attacks. That's the conclusion of Arbor Networks' latest annual study on the Internet's operational security, released today.

"This is a significant milestone in the arms race between attackers and defenders," Arbor Networks said. "We believe that the scope and prevalence of IPv6 DDoS attacks will gradually increase over time as IPv6 is more … Read more

Editors' note: This story was originally published June 17, 2011.

The number of hacking events of late is making our heads spin at CNET. There were scores of computer attacks, network intrusions and data breaches in 2011 and the trend shows no signs of abating in 2012.

In previous coverage, we've noted that it seems to be open hacking season, written about some of the hackers and groups who are behind the attacks,and speculated on their motives, so we thought we'd provide a chronological chart listing the attacks so we could all keep up on them. We … Read more

The Department of Homeland Security is disputing a government memo obtained by Nextgov.com that said a targeted attack on the computer network of a railway company in the Northwest disrupted train service in early December.

"Following more in-depth analysis, it appears that the potential cyber incident did not in fact target a transportation entity," a senior DHS official told CNET today. "DHS worked with the affected entity, the FBI, and the Transportation Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC) to resolve the issue and send alerts to notify the community of the anomalous activity as it was … Read more