CyberSecurity World

Story : Aleksei Burkov, 29 of St. Petersburg, Russia, has pleaded guilty in a US court to running a site that sold stolen payment card data and administering a highly secretive crime forum that counted among its members, some of the most elite Russian cybercrooks. More Detail : Aleksei, who was extradited to the US from Israel in November, pleaded guilty on Thursday to running a website that helped people commit in credit-card fraud. He is accused of running a website that let people buy stolen credit-card numbers for anywhere from $3 to $60 . People used the numbers to make more than $20 million in fraudulent purchases. Prosecutors say Burkov even offered a money-back guarantee if a stolen card number no longer worked.  Company: Aleksei admitted to running CardPlanet, a site that sold more than 150,000 stolen credit card accounts, and to being the founder and administrator of DirectConnection , an underground community that attracted some of the...

The company reported suspicious activity earlier this year, but the scale of the breach is far bigger than first anticipated. At least 1,025 of its restaurants were targeted - with debit and credit card information stolen. The company did not speculate how many people may have been affected, though it did say all of the locations were in the US. Malware - malicious software - had been installed on point-of-sale systems in the affected locations. The chain said it was confident the threat had been removed, and was now offering help to customers who may have been affected. Help includes the offer of one year of "complimentary" fraud protection services. In a statement outlining the details of the attack, Wendy's said the malware could have been operational in its restaurants from as early as Autumn 2015. Suspicious activity was noticed in February of this year. The company went public with this discovery in May - saying it believed around 300 restaurants...

ICO Referendum result response An ICO spokesperson said: “The Data Protection Act remains the law of the land irrespective of the referendum result. “If the UK is not part of the EU, then upcoming EU reforms to data protection law would not directly apply to the UK. But if the UK wants to trade with the Single Market on equal terms we would have to prove 'adequacy' - in other words UK data protection standards would have to be equivalent to the EU's General Data Protection Regulation framework starting in 2018. “With so many businesses and services operating across borders, international consistency around data protection laws and rights is crucial both to businesses and organisations and to consumers and citizens. The ICO’s role has always involved working closely with regulators in other countries, and that would continue to be the case. “Having clear laws with safeguards in place is more important than ever given the growing digital economy, and we will be s...

Security professionals are faced with the on-going problem of stakeholders under-estimating the security flaws within their organisation. In most cases this is not the failing of the security team but depending on the market/vertical, teams are faced with budget constraints, redundancies, or most commonly, companies not taking responsibility that Security starts within. This means educating internal staff to take responsibility from the moment they walk into the office; I.e. The devices they bring, the doors that they open to 'guests',  the confidential conversations they have in open areas and the general ethos. Furthermore, there is the responsibility of your key suppliers and other third parties that you share information with.  You may have all the IT/Cyber security gadgets and resources you need but what are your suppliers doing with that data? Do they share the same vision for security and are they as vigilant as you? How do you measure that in an effici...

Money is urgently needed from the Government's £860 million National Cyber Security Programme to plug big holes in the police's ability to combat cyber-crime, which is now reaching crisis levels. That's the key finding from an authoritative new  survey   by PA Consulting which finds that only 30 percent of UK police analysts believe they have the skills and tools to effectively combat cyber-crime. “The UK has reached a ‘tipping point' on cyber-crime and tackling the challenges is now urgent,” the report reads. PA Consulting finds that one-third of the 185 analysts questioned from 48 law enforcement organisations have been unable to share information about the cyber-threat, and just five percent believe they have ‘considerable knowledge' of cyber-crime. The respondents predict that the time they will spend analysing cyber-crime will treble over the next three years – yet they already have limited scope to deal with the problem, spending only 10 percent of th...