After LinkedIn, Last.Fm and eHarmony, now it’s TechRadar’s turn to admit that cybercriminals have gained access to its user database. As a result of the attack, usernames, encrypted passwords, email addresses and birth dates have been stolen.

“Our IT team has identified the cause of the problem and has taken action to rectify it,” Nick Merritt, publisher at TechRadar, explained.

In the meantime, the forums have been shut down and will remain that way until the company’s representatives are certain that all the security holes are properly patched up.

Impacted customers will be contacted and advised to change all the passwords that are similar to the ones used to protect their TechRadar accounts

7 Steps to Cloud Security

Everyone is buying servers in the cloud and it makes great economic sense. It's all about on-demand infrastucture at a reasonable price. It's cost effective computing on-tap.  But the security risks are high. Organisations need a simple and cost effective method of reducing the risks but the question is How?

We believe strongly in the 80:20 rule - getting a reasonable security system in place is so much better than leaving it to chance. Most systems fail on security due to mis-configuration and/or  poor patching. This means that the system has vulnerabilities which are unknown to the company,  but are  very much present and available to be exploited by the bad & evil of this world.

Both Visa and MasterCard, have warned that their cardholders’ account information may have been put at risk when a third-party processor of card transactions reported that its systems had been breached.

Both companies alerted card issuers regarding accounts that may have been affected. Visa said card account information from “all major card brands” may have been affected.

The breach occoured at Globlal Payments (Atlanta) who said on Friday that they determined in early March that the card data had been accessed. The Federal law agencies were informed.

The new chief executive of Research in Motion, the maker of Blackberry smartphones, signalled that he would be open to selling the company after it posted another catastrophic set of sales figures and plunged into the red.

Revenues over the past three months, including the Christmas period when rival Apple sold millions of iPhones and iPads, were down 25 per cent, RIM said last night.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/blackberry-maker-rim-open-to-selling-as-revenues-slump-by-25-per-cent-7601293.html

The European Commission proposed on the 28th March to the establishment of a new European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) at Europol in The Hague, which will become the focal point in the EU’s fight against cybercrime. The Centre, which will be operational by 1 January 2013, will pool expertise and information, support criminal investigations and promote EU-wide solutions, while raising awareness of cybercrime issues across the Union.

In addition to the analytical and operational support already provided by Europol, the European Cybercrime Centre will serve as the European information hub on cybercrime, developing cutting edge digital forensic capabilities to support investigations in the EU and building capacity to combat cybercrime through training, awareness raising and delivering best practice on cybercrime investigations.

In addition, the Centre will build a community of experts from all sectors of society to combat and prevent cybercrime and online child sexual abuse.

https://www.europol.europa.eu/content/press/european-cybercrime-centre-be-established-europol-1417

Less than four years ago, Huawei Technologies and Symantec teamed up to develop computer network security products.

The joint venture is being dismantled because Symantec fear that the alliance with the Chinese company would prevent it from obtaining United States government classified information about cyberthreats.

It is just natural that the West is suspicious about Huawei when dealing with national security critical infrastructures.

"Huawei [is] disappointed by a government decision to exclude the Chinese company from the 36 billion Australian dollar (US$37.6 billion) National Broadband Network over reported concerns about cyberattacks from China."

Although e-mail continues to be the primary source of data-loss risk at enterprises, the number of data-loss events associated with social media tools — and related disciplinary actions — continues to grow, a new study found.

In fact, 35% of large enterprises have investigated a leak of confidential, sensitive, or proprietary data via e-mail in the past year, according to a study of 261 large businesses by Osterman Research for Proofpoint. And 25% of the U.S. companies surveyed had looked into the exposure of such information via a blog or message board, compared with 18% in 2009, the study found.