Top Stories
Angry Birds and other Facebook apps score low on privacy
April 22, 2012
A new service that grades how each of Facebook’s top third-party apps respects consumers’ privacy was released late Sunday by research firm PrivacyChoice. The free tool, Privacyscore for Facebook, spells out privacy policies and tracking practices of more than 200 top Facebook apps, including games, work-related programs and sharing apps.
Online tracking is fueling a heated national debate over whether new do-not-track laws are needed to safeguard …More
Mobile devices carry intrinsic security flaws
April 9, 2012
By Byron Acohido, USA TODAY, 09Apr2012, P1B
Those cool mobile devices beloved by consumers carry deep-rooted security flaws that are only now being discovered and addressed.
That’s the upshot of two recent deep examinations of popular mobile devices. The findings highlight how designers of the current generation of smartphones and tablet PCs failed to fully account for the security and privacy implications.
“Today’s smartphones and tablet devices perform the …More
Milestone botnet comprised of 600,000 infected Macs
April 5, 2012
This was inevitable. A cyber gang has assembled a botnet comprised of Apple Macs, not Windows PCs.
An unpatched portion of Java left Mac users prone to the Flashback Trojan, which causes the machine to quietly report to a command and control server for further instructions.
Mac users can get infected by navigating to a viral web page pre-loaded to deliver a driveby download tuned to exploit this …More
Merchants, consumers on hook due to card processor breach
March 30, 2012
Merchants and consumers could be the big losers in the latest case of hackers cracking the complex systems used to process credit and debit card transactions.
Visa and MasterCard acknowledged Friday that they’ve been alerting banks about a major breach of an unnamed payment card processing firm. The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources, named Atlanta-based Global Payments as the processor in question.
Global Payments declined interview …More
Caller ID spoofers raid online banking accounts
March 16, 2012
By Byron Acohido, USA TODAY, 16March2012, P1B
Cyberthieves are stepping up phone-calling scams to pilfer from consumers’ online banking accounts.
In the second half of 2011, Pindrop Security detected more than 1 million fraudulent calls, including 189,439 in December, a 52% spike from the 124,258 calls tracked in July, according to a first of its kind reporte released Thursday.
“Mobile is a growth area for online banking fraud,” says Stan …More
Cyber attacks on mobile devices gain meaningful traction
March 7, 2012
Something the security community has been fretting about for a few years, seems to have finally arrived in earnest: cybercriminals are going mobile.
Nearly one in five mobile phone users have experienced some type of security threat with their device. That’s the finding of a Cloudmark survey of 1,000 cellphone users, scheduled to be released Tuesday.
Poisoned text messages, nearly non-existent in the U.S. a few years ago, …More
Companies embrace tools to restrict social networks at work
February 29, 2012
By Byron Acohido, USA TODAY, 29Feb2012, P1B
SAN FRANCISCO – When Randy Kortering decided to upgrade computer network defenses at Haworth, a $1 billion-a-year office fixtures manufacturer, his chief of security warned him about social-networking use.
“He laid out what was coming through a Facebook connection and how it could very quickly spread a virus that we weren’t prepared to block,” recalls Kortering, vice president of global information services …More
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