Breach

The notorious Storm worm trojan has continued its holiday-themed onslaught with a massive wave of "love" notes that attempt to deliver a poison kiss to a recipient's PC in the form of malicious code.

Script-based attacks that cycle through multiple exploits and target trusted websites, increasingly sophisticated botnets, and cyberespionage that uses phishing to steal terabytes of data head SANS Institute's Top 10 list of 2008 security menaces.

A researcher has warned that the Silentbanker trojan apparently is able to circumvent two-factor authorization and inject itself into the middle of ongoing banking transactions, duping bank customers into sending money to attackers while the customer proceeds with what looks like a valid transaction.

A recent survey of 100 IT managers and CIOs from the financial services, health care, retail, manufacturing and government business sectors shows that despite a torrent of bad press on data-security breaches involving FTP (file-transfer protocol), its use is prevalent and growing.

Discount retail website Geeks.com has notified affected customers that a hacker may have accessed their credit card numbers and other personal information in a December incident. The website features the "hacker safe" notification from McAfee ScanAlert.

FAA has notified Boeing that it must make sure the new 787's flight control system can't be hacked by passengers surfing the web, but it did not mandate a manual override of in-flight internet access as requested by the pilots' association.

Information security pros are increasingly confronted by cybercriminals trawling their corporate networks for customers' private data. More than 80 percent of the respondants to the SC Magazine/MXI Security survey say guarding against data breaches is the focus of current security initiatives, reports SC Magazine Editor-In-Chief Illena Armstrong.