April 2, 2012 A security breach at payment processor Global Payments has resulted in up to 1.5 million North American credit card numbers being "exported," possibly opening the door to counterfeit card creation. Read more [...]

March 30, 2012 In a statement obtained by Joystiq , Microsoft says that it is "conducting a thorough investigation" into claims from researchers that credit card information can be swiped from used Xbox 360 consoles using simple modding tools. Microsoft states that the "Xbox is not designed to store credit card data locally on the console," and that it "seems unlikely credit card data was recovered by the method described." Drexel University research Ashley Podhrasky says that her team had successfully gained access to the console's files and folders using software, allowing them to extract data that hadn't been wiped — despite a factory setting restore from a Microsoft-authorized reseller. Microsoft says that it hasn't received information needed to... Read more [...]

March 30, 2012 Restoring an Xbox 360 console to factory settings before selling it apparently isn't enough to remove your personal information. In an interview with Kotaku , Drexel University researcher Ashley Podhradsky said that her team had successfully retrieved credit card data from a refurbished Xbox using simple modding tools. The software gave them access to the console's files and folders, letting them extract information that hadn't been wiped even by the Microsoft-authorized reseller. Read more [...]

March 29, 2012 As if CAPTCHAs don't already seem devious enough in their attempts to weed human visitors from robo-visitors, Google has come up with a new way to utilize the technology to gather data from guesses visitors submit. Instead of offering two jumbled or blurry words, ReCAPTCHA boxes (upgraded CAPTCHAs) are starting to show users a real image alongside a jumbled word. The image contains a legible but perhaps difficult to scan (via OCR ) address sign or street sign from Google StreetView Read more [...]

March 29, 2012 [This post is by Ellie Powers , a product manager on the Google Play team. — Tim Bray] As your apps have gotten more successful, more people have joined your team. Read more [...]

March 29, 2012 Security experts from Kaspersky Lab, CrowdStrike Intelligence Team, the Honeynet Project, and Dell SecureWorks have successfully downed a variant of the Kelihos botnet. The original 41,000-computer botnet was originally disabled by Microsoft and Kaspersky Lab back in September, but a second larger variant was discovered in February. The team of security researchers were able to down the new version by infiltrating the peer-to-peer network with fake clients designed to sinkhole other computers on the network Read more [...]

March 27, 2012 Only a day after releasing a framework to help companies "self-regulate" online privacy, the US Federal Trade Commission has settled with social gaming site RockYou, which the FTC says advertised a secure service while implementing poor practices that resulted in 32 million accounts being stolen by hackers in 2009 . Read more [...]

March 27, 2012 Four years ago, Symantec and Huawei formed a joint venture in Hong Kong called, appropriately enough, Huawei Symantec Technologies. The company combined Symantec's security with Huawei's storage and hardware, but last November Symantec announced it was selling its 49 percent stake to Huawei. Today, the reason for that may be a little clearer, as the New York Times is reporting that Symantic is concerned that having close ties with Huawei would be bad for business with the US government Read more [...]

March 23, 2012 The US military's computer networks are so infested with foreign spies that trying to fight them might not be worth the trouble, security experts say. Instead, the focus should be on protecting the data — such as information on nuclear weapons — that's in those networks. That's according to a group of experts from the US National Security Agency, who claim that future cybersecurity efforts should just "assume that the adversary is in our networks." According to Dr Kaigham Gabriel, head of the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, the current technique of defending against attacks is similar to treading water in the middle of the ocean — it's simply futile Read more [...]

March 23, 2012 Using facial recognition to process surveillance footage isn't a new concept — Scotland Yard began using the technique in the wake of last year's London riots — but a new system developed by Hitachi Kokusai Electric could make the process quicker and more flexible than ever before. Read more [...]