Data Protection — News

Brazilian hackers on the hunt for banking credentials are now targeting Bitcoin owners with a trick that sends victims to a phishing page when they enter the correct URL for Mt Gox, the online exchange that claims to account for 80 per cent of all Bitcoin trade.

Australian Information Security Association (AISA) has today, on the first day of National Cyber Security Awareness Week, taken the opportunity to flag research from its members, releasing an advisory note to the community at large.

It may have started out as a way of simplifying an increasingly complicated IT environment, but Brisbane law firm Cooper Grace Ward (CGW) has found its virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) investment is also delivering improved remote-access security, data protection and integrity of sensitive information.

Months on from the government’s bold PR initiative in which it said it would spend $1.46 billion on IT security, the release of the 2013-14 federal budget has shown little additional financial support for this and other cyber security initiatives.

Cloud, mobility and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) computing are providing so many new potential ingress points to your network that it’s getting near impossible to keep up. The solution, as David Braue finds, lies in reconsidering your exposure, revisiting your IAM strategy – and picking your battles carefully.

Trend Micro has given an overview of its Deep Discovery environment for Australian customers at its Evolve 2013 security conference in Sydney.

In a world that's only starting to agree on what defines “software defined networking”, it may sound surprising that VMWare believes the “SD” initials can be put in front of “data centres”—that's what the virtualisation vendor was putting forward at the Evolve 2013 Security Conference in Sydney.

What a time to be in the IT industry - right now technology is changing almost every aspect of our lives, and as IT professional we have front row tickets!

The decisions we make today will be felt for years to come by the organisations we work for, their owners, their customers, and their partners. (Sanjay Mehta)

Budget and ROI requirements, tempered by increasingly tight privacy and regulatory controls, are forcing companies to consider new approaches to data-security protections, the head of IT security for the National Australia Bank (NAB) has advised.

Malware vendors are warming to bitcoin, but the virtual currency has an unlikely rival in some geographies in the form of fake identity documents and money mules.

Malware authors have become so good at seeding exploits en masse that their monitoring, customer service, marketing and Australian localisation strategies have come to resemble professional business operations, a senior Trend Micro security researcher has observed.

A Website analytics tool, originally implemented by Internet service provider iiNet to gauge customer reaction to changes to its online applications, has delivered an unexpected bonus by allowing the company’s technical staff to detect and monitor hacking attempts in real time.

The idea of computer viruses persists in the popular memory but actually died a decade ago as commercially driven exploits increasingly pushed companies onto the back foot, Trend Micro chief technology officer Raimund Genes argued during a review of the evolution of malware over the past two decades.

Growing demand for IT security skills may have some CSOs worried about finding enough staff, yet some security executives believe the problem isn’t only with the universities – but with ambitious IT graduates that expect senior positions without first doing the hard work to deepen their knowledge.

Critical infrastructure operators remain vulnerable to attack from hackers whose motivations have matured from the “pretty juvenile” wanton vandalism of the 1990s to the aggressive, targeted and financially-motivated cyber war being waged online today, a one-time senior security advisor to the US president has warned.

In running one of the largest data warehouses in the world, online retailer eBay has faced down some unique challenges in delivering big-data analytics capabilities – not the least of which is ensuring that its more than 6,000 business users and analysts are tightly managed to prevent data privacy and security compromises.

Commemorations of Privacy Awareness Week included some high-profile pronouncements from Australia’s Privacy Commissioner, who has made it his goal to educate Australian businesses about their new obligations under privacy laws that will change in March 2014.

Microsoft on Friday confirmed a previously unknown vulnerability in Internet Explorer 8 that is believed to have been used to target people from the nuclear energy industry.

Australia’s pragmatic privacy legislation is “the gold standard” for world privacy legislation even when compared with the European Union’s long-established privacy regime, a US-based privacy expert has concluded – while advising privacy-conscious executives to make employees think like high-school girls if they really want to guarantee data integrity.

Mobile telecommunications carriers like Vodafone will increasingly play a role in normalising bring your own device (BYOD) programs by using deep packet inspection (DPI) technology to prevent the compromise and exploitation of mobile devices outside the corporate network, the head of security supplier BAE Systems Detica has predicted.