Information Security News
Tuesday, February 19th, 20081) Lottery Scams Are Latest Spam Fad
According to Microsoft (http://www.microsoft.com), 50% of spam emails are currently lottery scams (usually inviting the victim to claim their "winnings" or similar). Surprisingly, their poll also revealed that 16% of recipients actually opened them, indicating an almost complete lack of security awareness.
2) University Fined For Security Breach
The University of California has agreed to pay the U.S. DoE a $2.8 million fine as a result of a security breach at its Los Alamos National Laboratory. The fine stems from an incident in which a subcontractor’s employee stole classified documents and stored others on a USB drive in 2006.
3) Anti-botnet Charges
The FBI has announced that it has charged eight men with using internet ‘botnets’ to perform fraud and to launch other malicious attacks. The men are alleged to have profited by lifting sensitive credentials off their victims’ computers, releasing DDoS attacks and leasing ‘zombie computers’ to other parties.
4) Vista Security Fixes
Microsoft has released a detailed list of more than 300 security patches within the upcoming initial service pack (SP1) for its Windows Vista operating system. The complete list of SP1 service pack items is posted on Microsoft’s website
5) Security Gap
Gap, the clothing retail outlet, have admitted that the unencrypted Social Security numbers of 800,000 job applicants was stolen from a third-party vendor. The vendor contacted law enforcement authorities about the breach.
6) Software Piracy Settlement
6 US based companies have recently settle claims with the Business Software Alliance (http://www.bsa.org) over use of unlicensed software following self audits. The total settlement was for almost $700k.
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