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...

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...

Some of the world's biggest security companies are working together to develop 'Let's Encrypt' - a new certificate authority (CA) offering free and automatically renewable HTTPS web encryption. Due to launch next summer,  Let's Encrypt  has been established by Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, IdenTrust as well as researchers at the University of Michigan  - who are working through the California-based Internet Security Research Group (ISRG). The aim is for the CA to drive the adoption of HTTPS web encryption and to do this by making obtaining the SSL certificate as easy as clicking a button or issuing a simple shell command. The accreditation is free to anyone who owns a web domain, certificates can be reviewed for transparency, while the security companies behind the project say that the management software installed on web servers proves that the domain holder controls the website, has obtained a browser-trusted certificate and h...