Cyber Crime

Pierluigi Paganini April 11, 2012
Medicaid incident. How much cost a data breach?

The Utah Department of Technology Services (DTS) has announced that the Utah Department of Health (UDOH) was victim of an hack. On Monday the server that hosts Medicaid was hacked, the news of the breach has been published on Wednesday. In a first time the entity of the data breach has been estimated in 181,604 […]

Pierluigi Paganini April 09, 2012
Synaptic Labs’ Annual Reports on the Global Cyber Safety and Security Status, Technical Problems, Drivers and Incentives (2012)

It is clear that there is an unrelenting increase in cyber attacks.  Indeed, the media at large is now bombarding the community with a stream of isolated security incidents, one after the other, leaving most of us on “main street” feeling paralyzed and wondering:  Is this just sensationalism?  How bad is the situation really?   Those of us who […]

Pierluigi Paganini April 08, 2012
Anonymous attacks the UK government.OpTrialAtHome, Tango Down

As announced during last days Anonymous has launched a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) against several UK government websites. A massive recruiting campaign is started on social media, a call to arm to protest the extradition of U.K. citizens to the United States. The Operation named “Operation Trial At Home,” fight the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) that could […]

Pierluigi Paganini April 06, 2012
Cyber terrorism, cyber attacks against al Qaeda 2.0

The encounter with terrorism technology, widely defined cyber terrorism, is one of the main threats for each country. Wrongly, we tend to associate a terrorist act to a physical event as an explosion, a conflict, a tragedy, but the common people totally ignore the potential threat of a cyber offensive. We learned about the devastating […]

Pierluigi Paganini April 05, 2012
Anonymous, its strategy against censorship and the diversionary theory

Groups of hacktivist like Anonymous are the actual news of the global technology landscape, a new force with which and against which confront. As repeatedly stressed I consider the moment of confrontation with the group a moment of growth for the IT professional in many ways, on all: having to deal with the cyber threat that […]

Pierluigi Paganini April 04, 2012
1-day exploits,Binary Diffing & patch management.The side threats

Recently ESET security firm has reported the latest version of the Blackhole exploit kit that has been updated to include a new exploit for the Java CVE-2012-0507 vulnerability.  The exploit was discovered for the first time on 7.03.2012 and it first detections were dated on March 12, 2012 and today a public module for Metasploit […]

Pierluigi Paganini April 03, 2012
UPGRADE – VISA, MASTERCARD and GPN breach

The day is come, yesterday morning as planned Global Payments Inc., the Atlanta-based credit and debit card processor that recently announced a breach that exposed fewer than 1.5 million card accounts, held a conference call to discuss about the breach and its impacts. Again Krebson Security Blog is the more accredited source in my opinion, they […]

Pierluigi Paganini April 01, 2012
VISA & MASTERCARD breach raises Security doubts on standard compliance

The Krebs on Security blog reported that there has been a security breach at Global Payments that “may involve more than 10 million compromised card numbers.”  We are facing with a massive breach that could impact more over 10 million compromised card numbers, for this reason VISA and MasterCard are alerting banks across US about […]

Pierluigi Paganini March 30, 2012
Anonymous, Operation BlackOut and the two final

Hi all, I write a few hours before the fateful D-Day, March 31th … What happens tomorrow when I wake up? For sure I will breakfast, tomorrow I’ll not work so after breakfast turning on my PC will I be able to navigate on internet? What was the outcome of the Operation Blackout? I am the […]

Pierluigi Paganini March 26, 2012
Reflections on the Zero-Days Exploits market starting from Forbes’s article

The news that I wish discuss was published on the website of Forbes magazine, titled “Shopping For Zero-Days: A Price List For Hackers’ Secret Software Exploits“,  that focuses on the commercial value of the vulnerability of popular applications. Time ago the figure of the hacker was recognized mainly as a researcher interested to measures its skills […]