Home improvement retailer The Home Depot, which revealed in September that its payment data systems had been breached, has disclosed additional information related to the company's recent hacking incident. The findings are the result of investigations in cooperation with law enforcement and third-party IT security experts. The big revelation in the latest update is that, in addition to credit card data, the hackers got access to separate files containing 53 million email addresses. Home Depot says the files did not contain passwords, payment card information or other sensitive personal data, but it warned customers to be on the lookout for possible phishing scams. The company says cyber criminals used ...
Read More

IBM is putting added emphasis on its cyber security business, and yesterday the company announced a new suite of products and services designed to help secure cloud environments. The company said its new Dynamic Cloud Security portfolio addresses security gaps that can exist between on-premise, cloud, software-as-a-service and mobile applications. “Customers are now moving critical workloads to the cloud and they expect enterprise grade security to move with it,” Brendan Hannigan, general manager of IBM Security Systems, said in a statement. “We have pivoted our entire security portfolio to the cloud to help customers lock down user access, control data and maintain visibility ...
Read More

American defense contractor Raytheon reported today that it is beefing up its cyber capabilities with the acquisition of Blackbird Technologies, a Virginia-based provider of persistent surveillance, secure tactical communications, and cyber security solutions to the Intelligence Community and special operations market. The total cost will be approximately $420 million, Raytheon says. Blackbird currently supports customers in the Intelligence Community, Special Operations Command and the intelligence organizations supporting the Department of Defense. The company will become part of Raytheon Company's Intelligence, Information and Services business. Raytheon says the acquisition will increase its special operations capabilities in tactical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, secure tactical communications and cyber security ...
Read More

The digital economy is getting hammered with advanced cyber attacks. As a business executive your awareness of this issue grows daily and cyber security is now weighing on your mind. You are not alone. After interviewing 588 C-suite and Board-level executives, the Lloyds’ 2013 Risk Index reported that Cyber Risk is considered the 3rd highest business risk — outranked only by high taxation and loss of customers. As industry experiences its rude awakening to cyber risk you might expect that it’s time to invest heavily in IT security and you would be right in realizing that it’s not. There is much deeper change ...
Read More

The 2014 Cyber Security Summit is less than two months away and will contain more actionable takeaways for attendees than ever before. (View this year's agenda here.) However, with cyber threats showing no signs of slowing down, plans are already well underway for the 2015 Summit, beginning with today's announcement of the 2015 Summit Chair: Andrew Borene. "I am honored to have been asked to help communicate the global leadership of cyber security solutions, policy and providers from within America's heartland," Borene said. "Addressing the increasingly real challenges for our companies, governments and individual privacy require strong public-private partnerships for ...
Read More

This week marks yet another historic moment in cyber breaches: Security researchers say Russian hackers have stolen 4.5 billion records, gathered from more 400,000 websites, with 1.2 billion of these credentials appearing to be unique and belonging to over half a billion email addresses. This dwarfs the number of individuals affected by the Target data breach, which included the credit card information of 40 million customers and around 70 million email and mailing addresses. Hold Security, an information security and investigations company, released a statement this week that after more than seven month of research, it was able to identify ...
Read More

With new reports of data breaches seemingly occurring on a monthly basis, companies are regularly encouraging users to change their passwords to protect personal and financial information. The most recognizable methods of attaining this information are keyloggers, phishing scams, Trojans, and more recently the Heartbleed bug, which may still pose a threat to users who assume that the problem has been fixed. However, there is another method for gaining access to data that many people overlook but that has been prevalent for some time: USB devices. In the past, a person with malicious intent was required to manually copy data onto a ...
Read More

Following reports of the well-documented Target data breach in 2013, the need to improve the existing security framework to ensure that customer credit card numbers and other personal data are no longer at risk has been brought up by corporations and media alike. Target Corp. responded to their data breach with a change in CIO and CEO, the latter being appointed earlier today. The widespread publicity surrounding the Target breach has brought added attention to the problem, but unfortunately it hasn't prevented other similar breaches from occurring in its wake. The entry point for the afflicted 70 million customers in the Target breach was the point-of-sale ...
Read More

Unisys Corporation recently sponsored a survey by the Ponemon Institute of 599 security executives of critical infrastructure providers. The top three functions of the respondents were chief information officer, business operations leader and IT security leader. According to the report, the research was conducted "to learn how utility, oil and gas, alternate energy and manufacturing organizations are addressing cyber security threats. These industries have become a high profile target for security exploits.” The survey found that almost 70 percent of the businesses surveyed had experienced a major security breach within the last year. 64 percent said they were expecting at ...
Read More