Crime Archives

Crime

Europol Warns of Internet of Things Risk

October 6, 2014 Paul Roberts

In a newly released report, Europol’s European Cybercrime Center (EC3) warns that the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) threatens to strengthen the hand of organized cyber criminal groups and make life much more difficult for police and governments that wish to pursue them. EC3’s latest Internet Organized Crime Threat Assessment (iOCTA) says the “Internet of Everything” will greatly complicate the work of law enforcement creating “new opportunities for everything from cyber criminals to state actors to child abusers. The growing numbers of connected devices will greatly expand the “attack surface” available for cyber criminal activity, the EC3 warns. Cyber criminals may co-opt connected devices for use in common criminal activity (like denial of service attacks and spam campaigns). However, advancements like connected (“smart”) vehicles and infrastructure create openings for large scale and disruptive attacks. The report, which was published late last months, is a high level position paper and pulls data mostly […]

Chief Security Officer: The Toughest Job In IT?

October 4, 2014 Paul Roberts

Register now for our CISO Hangout with Jon Trull of Qualys, the former Chief Security Officer for the State of Colorado. Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) are in the news a lot these days. The breaches at prominent corporations like Target, Home Depot and (this week) JP Morgan have solidified the consensus that the CISO is a necessary complement to the CIO. They’ve also shone a spotlight on what many consider to be the toughest job in corporate America. After all, successful cyber attacks and data breaches are the quickest path to a ruined corporate reputation. And a strong and capable CISO is increasingly seen as the best defense against such an unfortunate occurrence. (Target’s misfortune was the direct result, some argued, on its lack of a CISO.) With all that in the air, the time couldn’t be better to sit down with some of the top CISOs in industry and the public […]

Report: Hacked Password Behind Compromise of 75m JPMorgan Accounts

October 3, 2014 Paul Roberts

The top news this week is about Wall Street giant JP Morgan Chase, which disclosed on Thursday that a previously disclosed breach was much larger than initially believed, affecting more than 75 million account holders. And once again, reports suggest that a compromised employee account may be at the root of the incident. Bloomberg, which first broke the news of the cyber attack on JPMorgan Chase in August, said on Friday that hackers exploited an employee’s access to a development server as part of an attack on a JPMorgan Chase & Co. server that led to one of the largest cyber-attacks ever and the theft of data on 76 million households and 7 million small businesses. According to the Bloomberg report, which cited “people familiar with the bank’s review,” the breach started in June when an employee’s user name and password for what’s described as “a web-development server” were compromised. From that […]

Report: Home Depot Fallout Reveals History of Lax Security, Hiring

September 23, 2014 Paul Roberts

Its a truism in cyber security that behind every great hack often lies a string of bad decisions and missed opportunities. Its also true that when you dig into the details of damaging cyber incidents, the root causes are personal and psychological as often as they are technical in nature. Organizations -even sophisticated and wealthy organizations – end up making bad decisions for all the wrong reason: failing to properly assess their risk, or pursuing short term savings when long term investment is needed. Home Depot learned via law enforcement that a breach of transaction data exposed as many as 52 million credit card transactions, the largest retail credit card breach to date. But as more comes out about the breach at home improvement giant Home Depot, it starts to look a lot more like the root causes there may have started in the HR department rather than the data center. The […]

Will Big Data Transform Fraud Detection? | SmartData Collective

September 22, 2014 Paul Roberts

The folks over at Smart Data Collective have an interesting story today on Big Data and its (expected) impact on a variety of industries and business practices. Fraud (and fraud detection), it turns out, may be one area that is transformed by better data analytics. According to the article, by Monte Zweben, fraud analytics are posed to be transformed not just by “Big Data,” but by better and faster analytics. The article looks at a variety of industries, including consumer marketing and logistics that stand to benefit from the growth in data and data analytics. Fraud detection is one of them. Zweben cites statistics on the growth of fraud as a global problem. Kroll’s most recent Global Fraud Report found the number of companies falling victim to fraud has increased to 70 per cent. Credit card companies were among the first to embrace “Big Dat” analytics to spot irregularities in patterns of charges […]