The Online Security Report Explores Why 2006 Was the Year That Hacking Ceased to Be a Hobby and Became a Fulltime Occupation
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Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c59883)  has announced the addition of the new eMarketer Report "Online  Security: Counting the Cost of Fear" to their  offering.
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Security technologist Bruce Schneier explains that while cryptography is one of the most basic tools of computer security, it barely existed as an academic discipline 30 years ago.
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By GILES TURNBULL  2006 was a year of shifting territories among the big names of the internet.   Google grew from strength to strength' Yahoo! struggled to keep up its own momentum, and towards the end of the year had to make significant layoffs.
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The loss or theft of personal data such as credit card and Social Security numbers soared to unprecedented levels in 2007, and the trend isn't expected to turn around anytime soon as hackers stay a step ahead of security and laptops disappear with sensitive information.
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Kimmo Alkio takes stock of the current state of hackers, attackers, dot-bank domains and mobile phone viruses.
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Passwords to popular online world Second Life may have been stolen in hack attack.
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The rate at which personal computers are being hijacked by hackers rocketed in the first half of 2004, reveals a new report. An average of 30,000 computers per day were turned into enslaved âzombiesâ, compared with just 2000 per day in 2003.
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Attackers continue to use well-worn techniques, such as SQL injection, to exploit holes in popular Web applications but have also moved on to other targets, including government sites, and newer exploit methods, such as cross-site request forgery, according to the latest report filed by the Web Applications Security Consortium.The nonprofit industry group released the findings of its annual Hacking Incidents Database report this week, and despite the fact that cyber-criminals are still capable of using familiar means like SQL injection to victimize e-commerce sites and other transactional systems, a growing number of assailants are broadening their efforts and capabilities and going after new sets of targets, the research contends.Based on WASC's in-depth investigations into roughly 80 individual attacks carried out during calendar 2007, the group concludes that data theft remains the primary goal of most incidents, representing 42 percent of all the events.Surprisingly, site defacement -- thought to be a dying art in the world of profit-driven hacking -- actually still accounted for 23 percent of the attacks covered in the report, followed by exploits aimed at planting malware on sites at roughly 15 percent.And while the lion's share of the incidents studied by the group revolved around the attempted theft of sensitive data that could be sold on the underground market or used to carry out fraud, the phishing threats of years past are increasingly becoming outnumbered by attacks that utilize malware code hidden on legitimate Web applications to victimize unsuspecting end-users, the group said.Of all the threats studied by WASC in its report, 67 percent were designed specifically to derive some form of profit -- pointing to continued growth in the professionalism of those responsible for the attacks, researchers said."One of the biggest issues is that so much of this activity is being delivered directly though legitimate Web sites that are being hacked," said Ryan Barnett, a project leader at WASC who also serves as director of application security training at applications firewall vendor Breach Security, which sponsored the 2008 report."It used to be that as long as users didn't go to certain Web sites they'd be safe, but obviously, that's changing," he said. "SQL injection still works surprisingly well, so we're seeing plenty of those across the board, but you do also begin to see more use of things like cross-site request forgery, to which even greater numbers of sites might be vulnerable."SQL injection, which attempts to use security vulnerabilities occurring in the database layer of applications to compromise them, still remains a weak point in some widely-used Web systems, in particular e-commerce sites, a reality that the researcher views as surprising based on the well-established history of the technique. However, CSRF threats, which attempt to hijack authenticated Web sessions to carry out their ploys, are becoming more common, while still far less frequent than SQL injections, according to the expert. Indeed, CSRF threats accounted for only 2 percent of the incidents tracked by WASC for the 2007 report, while SQL injections represented 20 percent, the most popular format for exploit.Unintentional information disclosure, which involves sites that emanate such detailed authentication failures that hackers may use them to find a way in, was the second most popular format for attackers to break into applications at 15 percent, followed by cross-site scripting exploits, which use malware planted on legitimate sites to subvert end-users' machines, at 12 percent of the incidents.In terms of the types of organizations being assailed by the attacks tracked by WASC, the group found that government agencies actually represented the largest group of targets.Perhaps because financial services companies and retailers have improved their applications defenses, hackers have moved on to the government set as well as educational institutions, the report contends.Some 29 percent of the incidents covered in the report targeted government agencies, followed by education at 15 percent, and retailers and media outlets tied at 12 percent.In addition to attempts to steal data, WASC contends that government agencies may also be getting hacked by parties looking to embarrass or disable the organizations' sites based on ideological goals. Because government agencies are forced to report more of their security incidents publicly, hackers may merely be trying to force the organizations to admit that they have been exploited in public, the researchers said.
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Recently discovered vulnerability allows hackers to use Web graphics to launch attacks.
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A former security researcher who served time for hacking has been charged with new cybercrimes.
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'We are just a factory producing ammunition' Interview In June 2006, three Russian programmers started testing a collection of PHP scripts and exploit code to automate the compromise of computers that visit malicious websites.â¦
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The explosive growth of Web 2.0 and user-generated content is changing the way we use the Internet and interact with one another. So congratulations, Time Magazine's Person of the Year 2006 is you.
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Internet users witnessed yet another wave of spam, worms, viruses and other online attacks in 2004, and experts predict the online world will grow even more dangerous in 2005. -washingtonpost.com
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Hackers, spammers and spies go into overdrive in December and January, when unsuspecting neophytes unwrap new computers, connect to the Internet, and, too often, get hit with viruses, spyware and other nefarious programs.
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Also: U.S. cyberwar games turn into hacker melee. See what people are saying on News.com Extra.
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Software vulnerabilities are bought and sold online, both by legitimate security companies and by thieves.
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Federal regulators warn that the  Internet is the thriving frontier for identity theft, but 72  percent of the thefts of personal information for scams last  year was done offline, a new report says.