Asbos breached by 55% of people
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About 55% of anti-social behaviour orders have been breached, a government spending watchdog says.
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Security firm Symantec and the Indiana University School of Informatics have discovered a new type of security threat that could leave up to 50 percent of home broadband users susceptible to attack.
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Â· State accused of bungling as flames claim 57 lives Â· Prime minister admits local forces cannot cope
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The huge losses reported by French bank Soci?t? G?n?rale, apparently caused by a rogue trader with inside knowledge of the bank's procedures, don't necessarily point to an IT systems failure but rather to poor management of those systems, analysts say.The bank has accused 31-year-old employee Jerome Kerviel of creating a fraudulent trading position in the bank's computers that ultimately caused it to lose around ?4.9 billion ($7.3 billion).Kerviel achieved this by, among other things, misappropriating computer passwords, the bank said. It has revealed few other technical details of what caused the losses.Management of passwords, including rescinding the old passwords of employees who move to different positions within the bank, or modifying the level of access those passwords allow, is often a task given to the lowest-level IT worker."It's dull and routine 99 percent of the time, but a vital backstop," said Bob McDowall, senior analyst at the TowerGroup. Senior IT managers should conduct more frequent reviews of password policies, he said.In some cases, it may not have been the security of the passwords themselves that posed a problem, but rather the access those passwords allowed, said Ian Walden, professor of information and communications law at Queen Mary, University of London.Organizations tend to think of access as being binary in nature: you get access to it all, or you don't, Walden said. In reality, there are many more levels of access. "In modern, complicated systems, the granularity has to be much more sophisticated."To make the best use of systems with advanced access controls, the IT department must have a thorough understanding of how the business works and where there is risk.IT departments and business managers have yet to find a way to wrap security into business processes so it is not an impediment, Walden said."IT in a company is not given a sufficient status," Walden said. "What's shocking is you would have thought that the financial sector was more sophisticated than this, but it still tends to be the case that security is an add-on and a block, something you've got to live with but you don't have to like, rather than being viewed as an integral part of the business structure."Workers should be able to do their job without having to share passwords when someone goes on holiday, and the IT department should not make it harder for people to perform their duties, Walden said.In one extreme example at telecommunications company BT, one employee didn't have the right to use a computer at all, but he found it helped him do his job, Walden said."By the time he was found, he had 90 passwords of different employees," Walden said.It's possible that financial institutions could use biometric systems, such as fingerprint scanners, to provider an added layer of security, McDowall said. Those systems, however, are expensive. Also, the sometimes-finicky fingerprint scanners may not be appropriate in a frantic trading environment, McDowall said.Questions remain about how Kerviel's losses could be so high given his job as relatively low-level trader. But Kerviel's career progression in 2005 from the bank's back office to the front office -- where he would have had access to client accounts -- is also troubling since he would have gained greater knowledge on the bank's inner controls, McDowall said.As an arbitrage trader, Kerviel made money off price differences between different financial products. Soci?t? G?n?rale said Kerviel balanced real and fake trades in order to avoid setting off internal alarms.Kerviel has been described in some press reports as a computer genius. However, most attackers used unsophisticated methods for exploiting systemic vulnerabilities in applications, processes and procedures, according to the 2005 "Insider Threat Study" by Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute.That report notes that sophisticated tools are also used in some attacks, which would demand that internal financial systems need to be designed on a more defensive footing.Programmers should code under the assumption that a hacker or employee will use every means in order to break in, said Ben Rothke, senior security consultant at BT's International Network Services."The underlying issue is that many systems are designed to stop honest people from making mistakes, but do not take into account those with malicious intent," Rothke said.It makes insider jobs one of the toughest to defend against. The psychological profile of an insider tends to be a disgruntled employee who feels wronged by the company, according to the Insider Threat Report.That in turn can lead to a suspicious behavior such as staying late at work, which paradoxically might only signal a committed employee."It's always the insider," Rothke said. "It's often harder to steal $10,000 from a bank than $10 million."
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Half a million people's records sent unecrypted Personal details of over half a million US service personnel and their relatives may have been compromised by a Pentagon contractor.â¦
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More disturbing than the fact that almost half of all enterprises haven't updated their disaster recovery/business continuity plan in the past year, only 41% have tested their plans in over the last 12 months. DR testing uncovers myriads of unforeseen problems.
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For the third time since June, Pfizer Inc. has disclosed a data breach involving sensitive information about employees. Affected this time: As many as 34,000 workers.
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Business & money: More than 1% of households were hit with some stage of repossession proceedings last year
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More than 100 people have been arrested in the largest global crackdown to date on identity theft, hacking and other Internet-based crimes, US Attorney General John Ashcroft said on Thursday.
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DECEMBER 08, 2004  - Some 40,000 computers in the UK&#39;s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) were unable to access their network last month when an IT technician erroneously installed a software upgrade.
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Â· Campaign speech paves way to insure 47m peopleÂ· Candidate haunted by failure of 1993 reform
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Multiple vulnerabilities have been reported in version five of the widely-used Kerberos authentication protocol. The most serious could be exploited by crackers to gain root control to authentication servers.
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About 74 percent of those who said they would not buy the same amount of Software Assurance maintenance said the economics did not make sense.
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More than 40% of Medicare contractors and state Medicaid agencies have experienced privacy breaches involving personal health information, according to report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office.
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The death toll in the massive tsunamis triggered by a magnitude 8.7 earthquake in South and Southeast Asia on Sunday has reached over 55,000.
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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
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Servers that managed global internet traffic have been subjected to a concerted attack by hackers.