attacks

A British government official has said the online networks set to carry this summer's Olympic Games could be targeted for online attacks by cybercriminals. No specific threats have been identified, but officials are nevertheless employing ... professional hackers to test the networks' security and readiness to resist various methods of attack. Francis Maude, the UK's Cabinet Office minister, is charged with supporting the workings of the government across all departments. He made specific comments about the possibility of such attacks while visiting Estonia, the eastern European state that has ... (view more)

A new survey shows that most IT professionals are very concerned at present about the activities of 'hacktivist' groups like Anonymous. According to the study's results, about six in every ten IT pros believe members of hacktivist cells are most ... likely to attack enterprise-wide computer systems. But the specialists don't believe that's the most worrisome threat they face. The survey was carried out by Bit9, a company that calls itself "the global leader in Advanced Threat Protection." IT Pros Believe Hacktivists Most Likely to Attack Bit9's recently released report shows that 61 per cent of ... (view more)

The international hacking group Anonymous has targeted the British government with a recent string of attacks. As a result, websites for both the United Kingdom's Home Office and for Downing Street were disabled. Anonymous , which is a loose ... collective of hackers from locations around the world, has become quite renowned in recent years. Members of the group, who call themselves "hacktivists" rather than straight-up hackers, have targeted credit card companies, copyright protection agencies, and even the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). They prefer the term "hacktivists" because their ... (view more)

Online battles between Saudi and Israeli hackers have moved from credit card hacks to the shutting down of whole websites. The online 'war' began early this month, when a hacker claiming to be from Saudi Arabia published stolen Israeli credit card ... details . The actual location of the hacker, who used the code-name xOmar 0 (and variations, such as OxOmar), remains in dispute, with some experts claiming he is in Mexico. Assertions about the number of compromised credit card accounts also vary from 15,000 to 400,000. Political Leaders Speak Out The credit card attack had political ramifications ... (view more)

Dozens of chemical companies have been hit with a wave of online attacks. At least 48 companies are confirmed to have been hit, of which 29 were in the chemical sector. The remaining 19 companies were involved in the chemical defense sector. ... According to security researchers at Symantec, the assault ran from July until the middle of September, though the effects are still being felt. The true scale may be larger: at least 101 different locations are known to be housing computers infected by the attack, covering 20 different countries. (Source: symantec.com ) Cyber Attacks Use Low-Tech ... (view more)

According to a new report from security firm Symantec, the volume and complexity of web-based hacker attacks continues to grow. Symantec says the total daily number of online attacks actually jumped an incredible 93 per cent from 2009 to 2010. Also ... rising to concerning levels was the number of attacks launched upon mobile platforms. Symantec's findings come to us courtesy of the company's "Internet Security Threat Report," which was released on Tuesday. The findings were certainly eye-catching, including one report which suggests that hacking results in an average of 262,767 exploited ... (view more)

A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may ... vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts of a person or people to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely. Perpetrators of DoS attacks typically target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks, credit card payment gateways, and even root name ... (view more)

According to a recent report from security firm McAfee, Chinese cyber criminals have been leading coordinated and covert attacks on major Western energy companies since November 2009. McAfee, which has dubbed the cyber terrorism offensive 'Night ... Dragon', says oil and petrochemical firms have been affected. Perhaps the most surprising finding in the report is that many of these major companies, which have not been named, do not appear to have had particularly robust defense measures in place. "The attacks were not very sophisticated and did not use any zero-day exploits ," noted McAfee Labs ... (view more)

An international report says that the term "cyber war" overstates the genuine security risks that national governments face in the online age. It goes on to note that officials need to plan for accidental incidents as well as attacks. The report, ... from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, says that comparing online attacks to an armed military conflict exaggerates the potential effects. It also argues that a financial crisis or a health pandemic would also be much more serious than cyber attacks. The key finding of the report is that most forms of attack against ... (view more)

Microsoft has revealed that hackers have attempted to exploit a bug in Microsoft Word. The bug was fixed in a security update last month, but the company is also concerned that some users may not have installed the update. The bug involves the way ... MS Word handles rich text format (.RTF) files. This is a format used for text documents that have a very limited degree of formatting information compared to full-blown MS Word documents. The format is most commonly used as a way of moving documents from one word processor to another without altering the text's formatting. RTF Flaw Causes Memory ... (view more)