Stories about: Internet Security Advisors Group

The network controlling the US's largest public electric company could be taken down by cyber-hackers because it fails to take basic best-practice security measures, a federal report says.

Corporations are woefully unprepared to counter attempts at corporate espionage, say experts who perform vulnerability assessments designed to uncover security weaknesses. US corporations lose as much as US$300 billion a year to hacking, cracking, physical security breaches and other criminal activity, according to Ira Winkler, author of Spies Among Us (Wiley, 2005) and president of the Internet Security Advisors Group, which performs espionage simulations and provides other services.

The Philadelphia Stock Exchange flows 300 million stock quotes per day over an electronic trading system at rates that climb as high as 20,000 quotes per second during peak periods. The systems also churns out extremely sensitive trading reports packed with proprietary customer information that must be stringently guarded from outside attacks and unauthorized internal access.

Security experts said last weekend's theft of a laptop computer belonging to the chairman of wireless communications vendor Qualcomm provides a vivid example of why companies should use technologies such as encryption and user authentication to protect sensitive data stored on mobile devices.

Web-based e-mail services from Critical Path Inc. were, until Thursday night, vulnerable to malicious hackers who could gain access to accounts, where they could read, write and delete messages as long as the user was logged on.

The U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan has unsealed a third complaint in the case of computer crackers from Kazakhstan who allegedly tried to extort US$200,000 from financial and news impresario Michael Bloomberg in exchange for not exploiting security holes in his Web site.

Several sites around the world were reportedly broken into and changed Tuesday by one or more people claiming to be calling attention to the fight between the music industry and the digital music-swapping Web site Napster Inc. in Redwood City, Calif.

An embarrassing loss of computer disks containing classified nuclear information at the Los Alamos National Laboratory highlights the need for companies and other organisations to have solid procedures in place to enforce all of their technology security policies, according to several security analysts.

Antivirus software vendors warned companies about another e-mail virus this week, this one nicknamed the Killer Résumé, but it appeared to have done little damage and was reportedly contained.

What's a week without reports of another e-mail virus outbreak?

Users who don't back up data got a wake-up call when the "I Love You" virus hit corporations and government agencies around the world.