Invasion of the Data Snatchers
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Think your PC is safe? Think again. A new study indicates your home computer is likely bogged down with spyware, viruses and other scourges wrought by hackers and PC pranksters. Ignorance may be bliss for some people, but for computer users, not knowing can be costly and inefficient.
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Some years ago, I got a job doing network support for the District Attorneyâs office in a large city that shall remain nameless. When I arrived, the network was a mess! Malware was rampant, Internet and WAN connections were saturated, and users were constantly complaining about slow computers and network performance. Even so, my attempts to enforce a mindful security policy were met with fierce resistance. The attitude among the legal staff was, âThis is my computer and my network; youâre just a computer janitor.â
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Beta search app creates vulnerabilities that may threaten your data's security.
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Sneaky program takes a different tack to capture people's passwords and potentially steal money.
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Restrictive hardware and convoluted rights management crimp consumer choices.
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Handling of images could allow an attacker to take over your PC.
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A computer security researcher figures out exactly how a high-tech scammer
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Hackers got into a database containing the Social Security numbers of
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Today, many people rely on computers to do homework, work, create, etc., so it's important to take special care with your data storage. This week you'll learn about how to protect your data and prevent intrusions.  By Vincent Deguzman. 0919
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Malware, carelessness, data leaks--whether internal or external threats, there's too many to count.
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Anonymous data sets are an enormous boon for researchers, but the recent de-anonymization of Netflix customer data shows there are privacy risks as well. Commentary by Bruce Schneier.
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bulk messages clogging instant-messaging accounts. AOL and its Anti-Spam Alliance partners -- EarthLink, Microsoft, and Yahoo
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Beta search app creates vulnerabilities that may threaten your data's   security.
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(InfoWorld) - Hard drives full of confidential data are still turning up on the second-hand market, researchers have reported. Investigations carried out on behalf of BT by the University of Glamorgan in the U.K., Edith Cowan University in Australia, and Longwood University in the U.S., found that 37 percent of drives surveyed had traces of personal data on them. Damningly, this figure is much the same as it was for the same surveys undertaken by the universities in each of the last two years, suggesting that either companies are ignoring the issue or simply lack the tools to adequately wipe data before resale. Sensitive information retrieved included salary details, financial data of specific companies, credit card numbers, medical data, visa applications, details of online purchases, and inevitably, online pornography. The sample totalled 350 hard drives acquired in online auctions. "Given the level of exposure that the subjects of security and identity theft has received in recent times, and the availability of suitable tools to ensure the safe disposal of information, it is difficult to understand why disks are still not being effectively cleaned before they are disposed off," said BT's security research head, Dr Andy Jones. "When organizations dispose off surplus and obsolete computers and hard disks, they must ensure that adequate procedures are in place to destroy any data and also to check that the procedures that are in place are effective -- whether they are handled by internal resources or through a third party contractor," he said. The full report -- which has yet to be made publically available -- reveals that buying second-hand disks is an unreliable way to get hold of storage. Of the 133 disks bought in the U.K., 44 percent of them didn't even work. But of those that did, 19 percent had enough information on them to identify the organization from which they had come, 65 percent had enough data to identify named people, and 17 percent contained "illicit" data. Techworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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They call it scraping -- when Web companies automatically harvest information from the likes of Yahoo, Google and craigslist. Now the Internet establishment is clamping down.
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How bad is the Monster.com data breach? Bad enough. Did the crooks get their hooks in deep? Remarkably deep. Gregg Keizer has the details on what has gone wrong so far in the Infostealer.Monstres attack.
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The dusty shelves of your local library are going high-tech with tagging chips. Civil liberties groups warn of a privacy nightmare.