According to today’s Wall Street Journal, “data compiled by NetWitness . . .  showed that hackers gained access to a wide array of data at 2,411 companies, from credit-card transactions to intellectual property.”  Starting in late 2008, the hackers are said to have gotten into corporate networks using social engineering methods.  Employees were enticed to click on Web sites [...]

According to a report by McAfee, in the last three months of 2009, about 1,095,000 computers in China and 1,057,000 computers in the United States were infected and made part of botnets used to send spam or attack Web sites.  Those numbers are in addition to the 10 million previously infected computers in each country.  Stewart [...]

After interviewing 5,000 folks, the latest annual Javelin study claims that the number of identity fraud victims in the United States increased 12 percent to 11.1 million adults in 2009, while the total annual fraud amount increased by 12.5 percent (or $6 billion) to $54 billion.   The report claims that small businesses are sustaining the most hits:  “They [...]

Twitter disclosed yesterday that it had to reset some passwords due to an exploit that really could have hit any company.  In essence, certain visitors to a fake peer-to-peer search engine signed up for an account using the same username and password they used on their Twitter accounts.  The owners of the fake P2P search engine used this information to access the [...]

More and more security firms are pushing their products towards the SMB market.  In a recent press release, Blackhat Solutions  looks to sell its services by warning “small to medium businesses of their financial and legal susceptibility in the face of increasingly sophisticated data hacking.”  This is no surprise given Forrester Research projects that about 40 percent of SMBs [...]

The facts are starting to surface regarding the recent attacks against Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft – all of which have been linked to Chinese interests.  According to one recent report, the attackers selected employees with access to proprietary data, determined their social networking friends and then hacked into those accounts.  Once in control of the friends’ [...]

According to the latest Ponemon COB report, data breach attacks have doubled this past year while the average cost of a data breach has increased to $204 per compromised record.  The Ponemon Institute looked at several variables when determining this $204 number, including:  lost business; legal fees; disclosure expenses; consulting help, including forensics; and remediation expenses such as improved [...]

Law firms generally bill by charging an hourly rate for their “timekeeper” services.  Billing rates can slide up or down based on the litigation matter or transaction – for example, the pre-packaged rates provided to an insurer for defense work – or by the seniority of the timekeeper – with partners potentially charging hundreds more [...]

As pointed out by this article, when it comes to network security, small business owners are often ”hampered by a lack of resources, fewer qualified security personnel, less money to buy necessary products, and more difficulties complying with regulations that often were written without companies of their size in mind.”  And, as pointed out in this article, a small business [...]

According to this article, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently said that ”privacy was no longer a ‘social norm”’.   This convenient point of view comes less than a month after Facebook changed the way it organizes user information.  Under the old system, people had the option of being  placed into regional networks like “North Jersey”, while the new system removes this distinction [...]