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VeriSign Inc, the company in charge of delivering people safely to more than half the world’s websites, has been hacked repeatedly by outsiders who stole undisclosed information from the leading Internet infrastructure company. The previously unreported breaches occurred in 2010 at the Reston, Virginia-based company, which is ultimately responsible for the integrity of Web addresses ending in .com, .net and .gov. VeriSign said its executives “do not believe these attacks breached the servers that support our Domain Name System network,” [...]

Gradian Systems, a UK-based Proofpoint partner, are now offering Proofpoint Enterprise Governance as part of their enterprise information governance solutions. Proofpoint, a pioneering security-as-a-service provider, is extending its information archiving and governance capabilities with the introduction of Proofpoint Enterprise Governance, an enterprise information governance solution that allows organizations to easily track, classify, apply policies and monitor unstructured information across the enterprise. Proofpoint Enterprise Governance uses patented, Digital Thread® technology to fingerprint documents and track their versions and destinations across disparate [...]

A security breach at the secure socket layers (SSL) certificate issuing authority of Dutch telco KPN has gone undetected for four years. The company’s Corporate Markets division announced on Friday that it has stopped issuing SSL certificates because in 2007 hackers compromised one of its servers. Previously issued certificates from KPN Corporate Markets remain in play, although there is an outside chance that they may have been compromised, the company confirmed. It has replaced its web servers and says it [...]

Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council has become the latest local authority to be named and shamed by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) after breaching the Data Protection Act by losing the details of 18,000 residents on an unencrypted memory stick. The device contained names, addresses and council payment details, although not bank account details, and has yet to be recovered despite being lost in May, according to the ICO. The council failed to ensure that memory sticks were encrypted, and did [...]

At least 29 firms involved in the chemicals industry were targeted by a recent series of cyber-attacks traced to China, according to Symantec. The security company said it had evidence a further 19 companies, including defence specialists, had also been affected.It said the attacks began in late July and lasted until mid-September. Symantec said the campaign was focused on intellectual property, including formulas and design processes.While the report did not reveal the names of any of the companies involved, it [...]

The UK has been subject to a “disturbing” number of cyber attacks, the director of communications intelligence agency GCHQ has said. Sensitive data on government computers has been targeted, along with defence, technology and engineering firms’ designs, Iain Lobban said in the Times. There was a “significant” unsuccessful internet-based attack on Foreign Office computer systems this summer, he added. On Tuesday, the government hosts a two-day conference on the issue. Foreign Secretary William Hague convened the London Conference on Cyberspace [...]

Facebook has revealed that every 24 hours it receives around 600,000 logins to the social networking website from impostors attempting to access users’ messages, photos and other personal information. This is the first time that Facebook has revealed how it is bombarded by hackers on a daily basis, according to the Telegraph. The figure was revealed in a Facebook blog post announcing new security measures to be implemented in the coming weeks to stop this kind of breach. Security experts [...]

In the past two days the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has reported serious data breaches involving three public bodies, two of which are NHS Trusts. Yesterday the ICO said that confidential patient records were found to have been dumped in public bins by staff at University Hospitals Coventry & Warwickshire NHS Trust on separate occasions this year. Sally Anne Poole, acting head of enforcement, explained that the sensitivity of the data held by the NHS imposes a duty to protect [...]

  The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has criticised a group that works with young offenders after the personal details of 100 young people were put at risk by the theft of an unencrypted laptop. Newcastle Youth Offending Team, part of the children’s services division at Newcastle City Council, confirmed that the device was stolen from the home of a contractor working for the organisation in January. The laptop contained the names, addresses, dates of birth and the schools attended by [...]

Former Labour minister David Blunkett revealed today that French president Nicolas Sarkozy had admitted that France was tapping UK government emails while he was Home Secretary. Speaking at the McAfee Focus security event in London today, Blunkett said that the conversation took place during talks around the movement of refugees from France to England. “Sarkozy was interior minister for France at the time,” said Blunkett. “We were negotiating how many refugees the UK would accept, and Sarkozy told me he [...]