Industry News
Here is the latest industry news from Network Defence and its partners.
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Memory stick lost by council workerA council worker dropped a memory stick containing private details of thousands of children which was later found by a member of the public in a second-hand car. The missing device contained sensitive information including the names, dates of birth, ethnicity and contact details of around 5,000 nursery-age children living in the Leeds area as well as confidential information about child protection and whether or not the children’s parents claimed state benefits. The data found was unencrypted, not surprising to some as recent research suggests many companies have been neglecting the importance of data and information security and ignoring encryption. IT decision makers are failing to adequately address information security despite some suffering a security breach last year. In recent news 70% of companies that had suffered a security breach stated the lost data was not encrypted, admitting that encryption technologies could have mitigated the risk.
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Cutting back on Security? Think Again!Organisations may be contemplating cutting back on security during these uncertain economic times, however The British Security Industry Association (BSIA) is advising otherwise and instead urges security systems and procedures be maintained. It has been reported that some local authorities may even cut back on their CCTV monitoring provision, leaving town and city centres at high risk; vulnerable to what could be serious incidents. It is tough times like this when it makes more sense for businesses and public sector bodies to increase security as opposed to cut back on it.
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IT security spending will increase in 2009In light of the economic downturn and cybercrime attacks on the increase, Finjan’s Web Security survey aimed at IT and security professionals finds that enterprises increase their IT security budgets for 2009 while their overall IT budgets tend to be reduced. The survey revealed that despite the total IT budgets for 2009 tend to be reduced in comparison to 2008, the IT security budget was more optimistic as 34% of the respondents indicated their IT security budgets for 2009 will increase suggesting organisations intend to dedicate a larger part of their total IT budgets to IT security. What’s more, this upward trend looks to be more pronounced in the financial and governmental sector than in others. Other research report issues of data security are deemed very important to businesses with the next most common issue being business continuity/disaster recovery. It has become apparent that economic pressures are forcing companies to rethink how they manage their business IT environment and how they can save money resulting in companies looking to reduce costs whilst at the same time improving overall efficiency.
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| A new variant of the Koobface worm has returned to menace users of Facebook. As before, the malware generates messages to friends of infected users on the social networking website. These messages direct the unwary into visiting websites that supposedly offer video clips. Would-be marks are told they need the latest copy of Adobe Flash to view this content and are prompted to download a file, which actually contains the worm's payload. If the code executes on a vulnerable Windows PC the user gets infected. The worm's lifecycle then begins anew, ready to target their Facebook friends too. The malware was first spotted in late July. Like a nasty case of herpes it flared up again last week, months after the initial attack. The latest variant of the malware typically comes in a less salacious package. The first wave of infections came with messages such as "Paris Hilton Tosses Dwarf On The Street" whereas the latest variant is more likely to pose as "secret video by Tom" or some such. The latest Koobface variant is programmed to hijack search queries and divert infected users to bogus sites, benefiting crooks through related ad hijacking and click fraud in the process. Facebook's advice for dealing with the worm can be found here. The social networking utility is in the process of purging spammed links to the malware from its systems, reports McAfee, which has a full write-up of the threat here. |
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