Google plans to focus in hardware based security methods.

Since security is a major concern for everyone, Google is interested more and more in hardware based security methods, experimenting with Yubikey technology through her services.

FCC Asks FAA for gadget use during flights !

Every single person who travels with planes frequently gets frustrated since no use of gadgets is allowed. However, it seems that this matter will change soon.

U.N. Nuclear Energy Agency Hack confirmed.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) stated that one of its servers was hacked and now  a name list of more than 100 people working there is exposed to the net.

Rewritten U.S. Bill will allow security agencies and police to read user E-mails without warrants

The United States government is set to vote an e-mail privacy bill which, will enable government agencies to read e-mails without warrants.

November 5 Hacking Spree as anti surveillance protest.

Several hacking groups went on a hacking spree, by hacking many company and government sites.

The United Nations want to pursue more Internet Surveillance.

The United Nations expressed the will to increase surveillance of internet users in order to prevent any possible terrorism actions.

Iranian nuclear program's computers play AC/DC after getting hit by virus

Computers used in Iran's nuclear program have fallen victim to a new virus that literally thunderstruck them, turning them on at night and forcing them to play AC/DC's 1990 song "Thunderstruck". The news comes from an Iranian scientist, who sent a letter to Finnish company F-Secure. According to the scientist the virus has appeared at the Natanz Uranium enrichment plant in central Iran, and at another facility in Fordo, to the south-west of the capital city of Tehran.

An innocent looking power strip can hack your network

ZDNet is reporting on a new DARPA-funded project that could have some corporations worried. It’s called the “Power Pwn,” and looks just like any normal power strip you see everywhere. Its abilities though far surpass those of common power strips.

Grum botnet taken down, spam mails massively reduced

The Grum botnet came to an end earlier this week after security researchers managed to shut down the Internet connections of the botnet's main servers. According to CNN, the shutdown operation started on Tuesday, when a Dutch ISP cut off the net connection to two of the botnet's servers. Another server in Panama was also found and had its Internet connection severed. One server remained online in Russia, but the Grum botnet's operators, who remain unknown, tried to bring a backup server in the Ukraine online. Fortunately, by that time security researchers were getting close and managed to get ISPs in the area to cut off the final server's connection on Wednesday.

Dropbox suffers outage, with reports of email address leaks at the same time

Yesterday at around 3pm ET many Dropbox users in The Netherlands, Germany, and the UK reported on the Dropbox forums that they could not sign into the service and that they were receiving spam from online gambling sites. The company declined to comment, but a forum user who also identified himself as an employee said Dropbox was investigating the reports.

A few hours later krebsonsecurity.com reported that Dropbox had issued a statement on the matter:

We‘re aware that some Dropbox users have been receiving spam to email addresses associated with their Dropbox accounts. Our top priority is investigating this issue thoroughly and updating you as soon as we can. We know it’s frustrating not to get an update with more details sooner, but please bear with us as our investigation continues.

In a second statement a few hours ago, a Dropbox employee confirmed that the outage was coincidental:

We wanted to update everyone about spam being sent to email addresses associated with some Dropbox accounts. We continue to investigate and our security team is working hard on this. We’ve also brought in a team of outside experts to make sure we leave no stone unturned.
 
While we haven’t had any reports of unauthorized activity on Dropbox accounts, we’ve taken a number of precautionary steps and continue to work around the clock to make sure your information is safe. We’ll continue to provide updates.
 
We also want to let you know that the dropbox.com site outage this afternoon (from 12:35 to 12:55 PDT) was incidental and not caused by any external factor or third party.
 
Joe

Not all Dropbox users were affected in the targeted countries.

One in five Microsoft logins are in the hands of hackers

Microsoft said that about 20 percent of Microsoft Account logins are found on lists of compromised credentials after the recent hack attacks on other service providers like LinkedIn and Yahoo.

People use the same passwords and login details across many internet services from different providers, Microsoft Account group manager Eric Doerr noted in a blog post on Sunday. That means that if one set of logins is compromised, all other accounts are at risk.

"These attacks shine a spotlight on the core issue — people reuse passwords between different websites. On average, we see successful password matches of around 20 percent of matching usernames," said Doer.

Despite all that, Microsoft is working hard to keep Hotmail and its associated services as secure as possible. They work really hard to educate users and make sure that they use good security practices, but if that fails, there are alternatives:

...we look to see if there is evidence of criminal activity, like sending spam. If we do see signs of criminal activity, we suspend the account and ask the rightful owner to go through account recovery to regain control.
 

Occasionally we get information about a set of customers, but there isn’t enough account information to identify who has reused passwords and is therefore at risk. Then we have a judgment call – do we ask 100% of those customers to reset their passwords, even though only 20% are probably at risk? Or do we leave the 20% at risk to avoid inconveniencing the 80%? Where there is a credible threat, the answer is simple – we err on the side of protecting customers...
 

This is done in an automated and secure way so no human actually sees the account info of our customers.

Nvidia forums hacked, 390000 accounts compromised

Late last night NVIDIA announced its forums had been hacked following the company's suspension of the service last week. The news comes just a day after it was revealed more than 400,000 Yahoo! Voice accounts had been compromised.

Graphic card maker Nvidia has officially confirmed the "system issue," they experience last week, was indeed the work of a hacker. The unknown hacker managed to break through Nvidia's hashed and salted password defenses, and gained access to 390,000 usernames, email addresses, and public-facing "About Me" profile information.

NVIDIA is currently investigating the incident and "are employing additional security measures to minimize the impact of future attacks," the company said. Nvidia "strongly recommends" that all its users change their passwords. "All user passwords for our Forums will be reset when the system comes back online. At that time, an email with a temporary password, along with instructions on how to change it, will be sent to the user’s registered email address."

In a statement to TheVerge, Nvidia said: "Three Nvidia sites were affected -- Nvidia Forums, which has about 290,000 registered users; Nvidia Developers Zone, with about 100,000; and the Nvidia Research site with about 1,200."

Currently, all forum activity are suspended as the company continues its investigation into the breach, once new security measure are put into place, the company will reopen all affected forums.