A computer hacker accessed highly personal data and controlled victims’ webcams as part of a sophisticated email scam carried out from his mother’s front room.
Matthew Anderson, 33, was a key member of an international gang, abusing his skills as a computer security expert to target businesses and individuals with spam containing hidden viruses, a court heard.
He controlled victims’ webcam devices remotely to see inside their homes, at one point boasting to a friend that he made a teenage girl cry by doing so.
Major national and international organisations, including Macmillan Publishers, the Toyota car company and the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, were also targeted in what prosecutor Hugh Davies described as a “fundamental breach of security”. (more)
For those of you unfamiliar with the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the Fourth Amendment is in place to guard citizens against unreasonable searches and seizures. Not that it really stops the government from doing so or anything but they try and it is for our own safety… most of the time. But Airport security and those scans can be quite a problem, what with all the radiation and all from the scanners etc. so aside from lead underwear and radiation blocking fig leaves on your delicates, another company has come up with Forth Amendment T-shirts with the prints in metallic dye that will show up on scans. (
more)
Almost a third of employees regularly breach enterprise mobile management policies by using personal smartphones for work purposes, according to a report.
The survey of 1,100 mobile workers by iPass, a provider of enterprise mobility services, found 22% of employees breached their employers’ strict smartphone policies when using non-managed personal smartphones to access corporate information, putting data at a security risk.
“Un-provisioned smartphones are a significant risk to enterprises,” said Steven Wastie, senior vice-president marketing and product management at iPass. “20% of these mobile employees have experienced a relevant security issue with their smartphone containing business data lost, stolen, infected or hacked.” (more)
Facebook has released the updated application for BlackBerry handsets which finally brought Places, the location-based tagging facility to rival the popular Foursquare service.
Yet with this, the developers must not have taken into account the BlackBerry Simulation Software, which for all intents and purposes is a fully functional device for the desktop yet purely for simulating the phone and testing applications, can be used to spoof your Facebook Places and Twitter status locations.
This screenshot gallery will guide you through everything. (more)
If you want to, however, go right to the good bit, by all means skip to it by clicking
here.
According to MWR InfoSecurity, at least two mobile phones that are being sold around the world are capable of being turned into Mobile bugging devices. The company says that most mobile phones are open to immediate cyber attack and network providers are doing little to help.
Recently MWR InfoSecurity alerted users worldwide that the Palm Pre mobile phone could be used as a bugging device without the user’s knowledge, and that phones using the Google Android system could be easily interrogated for passwords. They have now discovered that a HTC phone can be also be compromised and used as a remote bugging device. (more)
