It's being called GhostNet, after recently being discovered by Canadian Officials. A ten month investigation, conducted by the University of Toronto, has uncovered that multiple embassies and news services were infected with a piece of malware that allows the attacker to gain complete control of the remote system. ...

Those Nigerian scams aren't the only ones that are taking people for a ride. The year 2008 saw the biggest increase in online fraud than any other year, with the US topping the list of being "taken for a ride" --up by 33%. The fraud is not limited to said Nigerian scams; email spam is still a culprit, however the largest rise appears to come from persons posting on eBay and Craigslist. ...

You may or may not have heard of the "Conficker" worm. Since last October, it has spread and currently infects nine to fifteen million systems. Although your system may or may not be infected, you probably wouldn't know it, since the worm is set to fully activate on April 1, 2009. ...

One time I made a log in account for someone to use on my system. We'll call her Mary. She needed to login in to my system to do some work, and so I created the user name mary with a temporary password mary123. I asked Mary to change it when she got a moment. That moment never came. ...

Researcher Joanna Rutkowska released a paper today that identifies a potentially serious security exploit in Intel based CPU's. This security flaw is so severe, that it can allow an attacker to gain what some seem to describe as "beyond administrative access" to a system. Because this exploit appears to attack a physical memory space directly, it ranges from difficult to impossible to detect....

You'd think being on a platform miles out at sea would keep you safe from those pesky digital attackers. Perhaps not, in another case of "an inside job", what appears to be an IT employee gone wild decided to use both his priveledge and skills to disable an oil pipeline. Story from Wired ( http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/03/feds-hacker-dis.html ):...

As 2009 starts to define itself, I am not surprised to read about an increasing threats in the realm of web security. Cenzic, a provider of web application security and risk assessment, has recently released a report outlining recent trends in website security threats, based on information gathered during the last quarter of 2008. And things are not looking better....

An employee at Sophos.com is reporting that some ATM machines have been compromised to allow the attacker to obtain your card number. It seems as though this type of attack is very sophisticated and probably only implemented by persons who work at the banks, or have direct administrative access to these ATMmachines....