data breach

One of NATO website was hacked, as reported by the alliance Thursday. The e-Bookshop website, operated by an external company, contained no classified data and is now blocked.

Police dealing with cyber crimes had notified the alliance of "a probable data breach," the statement said without providing details.

"NATO'S e-Bookshop is a separate service for the public for the release of NATO information and does not contain any classified data," the statement said.
 

The survey of 583 US companies conducted by Ponemon Research and commissioned by Juniper Networks 90% of the polled said their companies suffered data breach as a result of hacking at least once during the past 12 months.

The survey shows that about 60% suffered two or more breaches over the past year with over 50% reporting they had little confidence of being able to stave off further attacks over the next 12 months.

"We expected a majority to say they had experienced a breach," said Johnnie Konstantas, director of product marketing at Juniper.

WordPress warned its users on the blog: “Earlier today the WordPress team noticed suspicious commits to several popular plugins (AddThis, WPtouch, and W3 Total Cache) containing cleverly disguised backdoors. We determined the commits were not from the authors, rolled them back, pushed updates to the plugins, and shut down access to the plugin repository while we looked for anything else unsavory.”

On Wednesday Australian government announced the legislation to prosecute cybercrime in view of a recent storm of attacks on multinational companies and institutions including governmental websites across the globe.

Attorney-General Robert McClelland said that cybercrime was a growing threat to individuals, businesses and governments with the country's giant resource industry having warned recently of near-daily hacking attempts from offshore.

This week Citigroup Inc reported new figures of how may users had been affected by the May data breach. The company said that it affected over 360,000 of its customers, or almost twice the initial number.

Citi has been pressed by regulators to disclose the details of data breach. On Wednesday the company provided more information.

The breach, which Citigroup first made public on June 8, was initially detected on May 10.

A total of 360,083 North American Citigroup credit card accounts were affected by the breach, the bank said.

Citigroup Inc has confirmed a data breach at its Citi Account Online, which resulted in that hundreds of thousands of bank card accounts were compromised. The hack was first reported by the Financial Times.

Recently Citi discovered unauthorized access to its Citi Account Online systems having conducted a routine monitoring. The company reported about 1% of card customers were affected by the hack. Citi said that names of the customers, account numbers and contact information including email addresses of the affected accounts were viewed.

The Obama administration pressed the US Congress this week to pass a proper legislation to protect consumers’ data and safeguard the nation's financial system and electric power grid from potentially devastating cyber-attacks.

Over the past year Congress rejected several cybersecurity bills while big companies such as Nasdaq OMX Group and Sony Corp suffered high-profile hacker attacks.

According to Symantec Corp report users’ personal information at Facebook may have been accidentally leaked to third parties, in particular advertisers, over the past few years.

The security firm wrote in a blog post that third-parties would have had access to personal information such as profiles, photographs and chat, and could have had the ability to post messages.

"We estimate that as of April 2011, close to 100,000 applications were enabling this leakage," the blog post said.

Fifth Third Processing Solutions, a provider of full-service payment solutions, launched new security solution to protect merchants against data breach. The company announced support for Hypercom Corporation's payment software with Voltage Security's point-to-point data encryption.

The combined security solutions help retailers and restaurants reduce the risk of data breaches by encrypting card data in the terminal and rendering it unusable until it is received and processed by Fifth Third Processing Solutions.

World nations may start a massive prosecution of Sony after it delayed disclosing a security breach of its popular PlayStation Network.

Last week on April 19 Sony shut down its PlayStation Network after discovering the breach. However, it was only this week Tuesday the company unveiled that the system had been hacked and that users’ data may have been stolen.

Several members of Congress in the United States were shocked by the breach and one U.S. law firm filed a lawsuit in California on behalf of consumers.

77 million accounts were compromised in a massive data breach incurred by Sony Corp. The company this week unveiled the fact of hacking of its video game online network that led to the theft of names, addresses and possibly credit card data belonging to 77 million user accounts.

The breach became known for Sony on April 19 which prompted the company to shut down the network. However, Sony did not uncover the news to the public until Tuesday.

Canadian federal IT staff was tricked into granting access to hackers who may be based in China. Being allowed to government computers crooks tried to steal information but according to official statements no data has been compromised. The breach led to severe Internet restrictions at Treasury Board and the Finance Department, reports CBC News.

According to new stats from Javelin Strategy & Research the number of victims of ID theft has declined by over a quarter in the United States last year. However, individual victims lost more money on average than ever before.

Javelin Strategy & Research published the results of the annual survey of consumer fraud which showed that total annual reported fraud was down to $37 billion in 2010 from $56 billion in 2009, but the average out-of-pocket loss soared to $631 from $387, over 60% increase.

Resuming the year events and developments Andreas M. Antonopoulos, NetworkWorld, noted that the reality is going weirder than fiction as the world was told about the operation Aurora, the first national-industrial sabotage attack with Stuxnet and in the end we see how “Wikileaks [is] about to become a constitutional crisis between the First amendment and a 1917 espionage law” Talking further on security in 2011 Antonopoulos has made the following predictions.

The last settlement related to the data breach has been achieved by Heartland Payment Systems. The payment processor has agreed to pay up to $5 million to Discover Financial Services in relation to a massive data compromise that hit the company in 2008.

Last January the payment processing firm revealed that malicious software in its processing system had been found, potentially compromising the card data of millions of people.