Stories about: Financial Institutions

The proliferation and popularity of collaborative Web 2.0 sites – there are around 250,000 new registrations to Facebook everyday – has changed the threat landscape and the way businesses need to think about security. Each year, newer technologies and weapons are being unleashed to leave Web users surprised, annoyed and at greater risk.‘Whaling’ or ‘spear phishing’, is one such threat and refers to phishing scams which specifically target high-worth individuals.

Eleven people have been charged or indicted in a massive identity theft and computer fraud scheme involving some of the largest data breaches in recent U.S. history, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Tuesday.

The director of the Australian High Tech Crime Centre believes that the diversity of malware and its abilities to circumvent security products, is the greatest threat on the local cyber crime landscape.

The Australasian Consumer Fraud Taskforce kicked off its Fraud Fortnight initiative this week, amid initial findings that Australians have dished out more than $700 million falling for online scams.

Spoofers, spammers and phishers, beware. There's a new gun in town, and some of the Internet's most powerful companies -- including Yahoo, Google, PayPal and AOL -- are brandishing it in the ongoing battle against e-mail fraud.

In the past, most enterprises defined a disaster as an act of nature--a hurricane, tornado, flood or fire that wipes out their ability to conduct business as usual. Today, with worldwide networks, 24/7 customer call centers and Web applications, a common electrical failure could spell disaster when communication is interrupted in the supply chain, online transactions are halted or networks are down. Online resource Dictionary.com has even added "business failure" to the list of calamitous events that define a disaster.

How bad was 2007 for breaches, vulnerabilities and similar mayhem? On the bright side, it was better than 2008 is forecast to be. With more of every sort of meltdown predicted -- more criminalization of the hacker community, more Web-application attacks, more phishing, more spamming, more zero-day attacks and more virtualization-related threats -- we're happy to tell you that you are likely to look back on 2007 as the peaceful old days.

Art Coviello, President of RSA and Executive Vice President of EMC Corporation, talks to Computerworld's Siobhan Chapman about enterprise threats, IT security spend and the rising threat posed by social networks.

The UK government has accused the Chinese of hacking into the computer systems of some of its leading companies, according reports published by the English press over the weekend.

New companies have to be brash to enter the network security market, given that the industry has witnessed an explosion in creativity over the past five years and considering that big players such as Microsoft and IBM increasingly are throwing their weight around in security.

The more money that companies spend on securing their IT operations from external attack, the more it seems they become aware that the potential threat posed by their own employees remains their most significant risk.