Key weaknesses in system are fixed, say operators:

As the phone hacking saga continues to grip the country, mobile operators are saying that spying on someone's voicemail messages wouldn't be possible today as several weaknesses in the systems have been eliminated.

Reporters and private investigators working for the News of the World and Sun, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., are accused of repeatedly illegally accessed the voicemail messages of more than 4,000 people -- from royal family m...

But is it a hoax?

The hacking group Anonymous is allegedly threatening to "destroy" Facebook on 5 November, accusing the social networking site of spying on users, cooperating with authoritarian governments and abusing people's privacy.

The threat is contained in a video that was posted on YouTube on July 16, which has now been viewed more than 700,000 times and has been getting more commen...

Criminals are using psychology to spread mobile malware:

Social engineers have been using various dirty tricks to fool people for centuries. Social engineering, the art of gaining access to buildings, systems or data by exploiting human psychology, rather than by breaking in or using technical hacking techniques, is as old as crime itself and has been used in many ways for decades.

For the past...

Attacks such as the ones detailed by McAfee this week in a report are frequent and hard to detect:

The strange e-mails arrived in executives' inboxes around the same time that the Australian oil company was negotiating a deal with a Chinese energy company.

The e-mails had the same structure and format as those sent around the company and were baited with text that appeared to refer to a supposed continuing discussion between executives. The messages looked authentic from a nontechnical perspect...

Many UK admins lack the skills, resources and time necessary to keep firewalls secure from well-drilled hackers, one of the country’s loading penetration testing experts has claimed while launching a new defence training course.

The problems start with expert oversight of the firewall and Intrusion Detection System (IDS) logs, said former head of penetration testing at the Royal Air Airforce, Steve Armstrong, who will lead the new SANS course, 464 Hacker Detection for Systems Administrators....

HSBC and Cathay Pacific share news inaccessible:

The Hong Kong Stock Exchange suspended trading in several shares yesterday following a glitch in its online news service that may have been caused by hacking, according to Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEx) chief executive Charles Li.

The glitch came on a day when several firms announced earnings, preventing investors from accessing company announcements made during the midday break.

“Friends don't let friends use IE6"

“Friends don't let friends use Internet Explorer 6," Microsoft said last week in launching a new site that tracks the progress of pushing IE6 market share below 1%.

News International in urgent IT security clampdown:

A fake ‘Murdoch dead’ news report, placed on newspaper The Sun’s website during a hacking attack last night by Lulz Security, has prompted a massive IT security crackdown at parent company News International.

Computerworld UK.com has learned that the hackers injected a preformatted HTML file into an old internal server at News International, which is used to serve a text entry window on screen in the company's content management system. ...