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Code Spaces Probably A ‘Target of Opportunity’

June 19, 2014 Paul Roberts

The spectacular collapse this week of Code Spaces, a cloud-based code repository, may have been the result of a an unspectacular “opportunistic” hack, rather than a targeted operation, according to one cloud security expert. The sudden demise of the online application repository has sent shock waves through the tech industry, laying bare what some say are lax practices among many cloud-based application and infrastructure providers. But the attack itself was almost certainly the result of a larger, indiscriminate cyber criminal campaign, said Jeff Schilling, the Chief Security Officer of Firehost, a Texas-based secure cloud provider. “This is something we pretty frequently: companies get held ransom with a DDoS attack, and if that doesn’t work, (the attackers) will resort to doing other things,” Schilling told The Security Ledger. But Code Spaces almost certainly wasn’t the only company the extortionists worked on, Schilling said. Instead, the company was likely caught up in a wide net […]

U.S. looks to create an ‘Internet of Postal Things’ – Computerworld

June 19, 2014 Paul Roberts

There’s an interesting article by Patrick Thibodeau over at Computerworld about how the U.S. Postal Service is soliciting ideas about leveraging Internet of Things technologies throughout its (massive) system. The Postal Service published a solicitation for a “supplier who has the expertise and critical knowledge of the Internet of Things,” as well as (big) data analytics. The goal is to harness data from throughout the Postal Service’s massive infrastructure in order to increase efficiency and lower costs. The U.S. Postal Service is one of world’s most extensive and efficient. But it has also been bleeding red ink in recent years. The Services reported a $15.9 billion net loss in fiscal year 2012 – much of it tied to mandated payments to meet future retiree health benefits. Those losses have narrowed in recent years. In May, the USPO reported a net loss of $1.9 billion in the second quarter and increased […]

Internet of Things to Increase Shortage of Security Professionals

June 17, 2014 Paul Roberts

The tech publication eWeek has an interesting interview with Sujata Ramamoorthy, the director for global information security for Cisco’s Threat Response, Intelligence, and Development (TRIAD) group about the impact of Internet of Things technology on the (already painful) shortage of IT security workers. According to Ramamoorthy, adoption of Internet of Things technologies and platforms will exacerbate the IT security worker shortage. “These trends are what are fueling the need for additional security skills in the industry, and because the networks themselves are getting more complex, the applications communicating over them are getting more complex,” she told eWeek reporter Rob Lemos. The increasing complexity of information infrastructure in IoT deployments, an explosion in the number of connected endpoints and a corresponding lack of visibility into cloud services all make the shortage of corporate security experts more critical, Ramamoorthy said. Already there is an estimated 1 million information-security staff and manager shortage globally, according […]

The Week in Data Breach: Pizza And Chinese Food

June 16, 2014 Paul Roberts

The news over the weekend was about more data breaches affecting chain restaurants. First, there are reports that the pizza chain Domino’s appears to have been hacked. The news came by way of an online post on Friday by a group claiming to have compromised servers used by Domino’s to store data on customers in France and Belgium. (Cached version of the announcement can be viewed here.) The group claims to have made off with information including the user name and password for 592,000 French customers and over 58,000 records from Belgian customers. It has asked Domino’s for payment of €30,000 in exchange for the data. The company has acknowledged the attack, but claims no customer financial data was stolen. In other news, the Chinese restaurant chain PF Chang’s acknowledged on Thursday that it was, indeed, the victim of a successful cyber attack that a breach last week that resulted […]

DDoS Attacks Hit Cloud Apps Evernote, Feedly

June 11, 2014 Paul Roberts

Large-scale attacks knocked two prominent, web-based services offline late Tuesday, as cyber criminals attempted extort money from the owners of news aggregation site Feedly and the hosted productivity tool Evernote. Feedly – a web site that pulls together news feeds from across the web – remained unreachable early Wednesday, while Evernote was back online. Both companies issued statements confirming that they were the victims of a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. “We’re actively working to neutralize a denial of service attack. You may experience problems accessing your Evernote while we resolve this,” read a message sent from Evernote’s Twitter account Tuesday evening at around 8:00 PM Eastern Time. And, around 5:00 AM Eastern on Wednesday, Feedly posted a blog entry that reads: “Criminals are attacking feedly (sp) with a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). The attacker is trying to extort us money to make it stop. We refused to give […]