IDC: Most Insider Leaks are Accidents

When it comes to security breaches leading to data loss, accidents caused by insiders are more frequent and generally do more damage than those caused by insiders with malicious intents, shoes a new study published by industry research firm IDC industry research firm and sponsored bu RSA.

According to a report, 52 % of respondents characterized their insider threat incidents as predominantly accidental, while only 19% believed the threats were deliberate. Another 26 % said their insider issues were an equal combination of accidental and malicious threats.

“One of the things that jumped out at us from the study was how many insider incidents are unintentional,” says Chris Young, senior vice president of RSA products, quoted by Dark Reading. “These are individual actors who often are just trying to do their jobs and don’t understand that what they are doing is dangerous.” Read more

All-time-record hacker pleads guilty

The “I am legend” of the hacking and data theft world, Albert Gonzales, decided to plead guilty and now faces 15 to 25 years in jail. Gonzales is accused of masterminding a hacking circle that stole 130 million credit and debit card numbers from major retail chains such as Barnes and Noble, T.J. Maxx, Sports Authority, and OfficeMax.

According to The Register, Gonzales, who also used to be a government informant, agreed to plead guilty to 19 felony counts in Massachusetts by September 11. He also intends to plead guilty to a New York indictment accusing him of similar crimes that targeted 11 Dave & Buster’s restaurants. And that’s not all!

The deal does not cover a third indictment in New Jersey against Gonzalez related to the alleged theft of data from more than 130 million credit card accounts from card payment processor Heartland Payment Systems and retailers Hannaford Brothers and 7-Eleven.

In what money is concerned, Gonzales will also say goodbye to nearly 1.65 million US dollars in cash, his Miami condominium, a 2006 BMW, laptop computers, three Rolex watches, and then some more!

Mozilla closes shop due to vendor security breach

The Mozilla Foundation takes security breaches very seriously. It immediately closed its online stores after finding out a third-party company that runs one of the sites’ back-end operations had suffered a breach.

The security issues affected GatewayCDI, an SMB with offices in three US cities, which runs the Mozilla Store, the foundation said in a blog post quoted by the Register. There is still no information to confirm whether any customers of the website selling coffee cups, tee-shirts, and other Mozilla promotional goods have been compromised.

“Once notified, we took the immediate preventative step of shutting down the Mozilla Store to ensure that no additional users could be compromised,” Mozilla representatives wrote. “Mozilla immediately reached out to GatewayCDI and encouraged them to quickly inform individuals whose data had been compromised.”

Mozilla also stated they were undergoing a thorough analysis of their systems to determine the cause and extent of the breach. Additionally, GatewayCDI  will make sure to contact directly any Mozilla Store customers who may have been affected by this blurry breach.

According to the same Register article, Mozilla also closed down its International Mozilla Store, although it wasn’t run by GatewayCDI. Both stores displayed a message saying “closed for maintenance.”

Oops, I accidently copied the Goldman Sachs “secret sauce”!

There has been much noise about the Goldman Sachs ex-employee who managed to leave the company with their secret solution to be faster and better than their financial services competitors. At first, the name of the company reporting the data breach was unclear, then more started whispering Goldman Sachs. Let’s sink into the juicy details.

It all started when a computer programmer was arrested for stealing classified application code that powerd his former employer’s, later identified as Goldman Sachs, high-speed financial trading platform. The programmer’s name, along with more details on the incident, were reproduced from an FBI affidavit by DarkReading:

According to an affidavit (PDF) filed by the arresting FBI officer and subsequently posted by news media, the programmer, Sergey Aleynikov, copied “proprietary trade code” from his company and uploaded it to a Website in Germany. He later quit his job at the New York firm and moved to a new company in Chicago that “intended to engage in high-volume automated trading” — and paid him around three times his old salary of $400,000, according to the affidavit.

The programmer says it was all a mistake. Apparently, he only wanted some open sourced files he was working on and ended up with the entire shabang. The fact he never sold the code or tried to otherwise use it plays in his favor. The fact he tried to hide all traces of the data transfer, doesn’t. But that’s somehting to be settled in a court.

What’s fascinating, as ZDNet’s Larry Dignan explained on one of the network’s blogs, is that Goldman Sachs, “a master at gauging risk”, was able to overlook the danger of inside threats. Especially when it’s something all security experts have been talking about for a long while.

When you think about it, nothing happened to Goldman Sachs. Other than a much needed wake up call. What could have happened? The competition actually improving their own platforms and taking over more and more clients from Goldman Sachs. I have a feeling adding up the numbers of this potential loss would make us all dizzy!.

T-Mobile USA – Was it or wasn’t it a data breach?

Did a data breach occur at T-Mobile USA? According to a group of hackers it did. They claimed to have gained access to all customer information of the company and posted network scans to prove it on the Full Disclosure web site. They also said they were trying to sell all the private records to T-Mobile’s competitors, who wouldn’t take them on the offer. Yet they’re still doing their best to sell all stolen info to the highest bidder.

T-Mobile has a different view on the story though. They said, and were quoted by ChannelWeb, that there is no proof whatsoever of any breach. And although the document posted online did in fact belong to T-Mobile, it contained to sensitive date, nor was it obtained while their system had been hacked into.

“The document in question has been determined to be a T-Mobile document, though there is no customer information contained in the document,” the company said in a statement. “There is no evidence to indicate that the T-Mobile security system was hacked into nor any evidence of a breach.”

While ChannelWeb seems to incline to believe T-Mobile on this one, their security experts say large mobile carriers often fall pray to hackers who harest their confidential customer records for their own benefit, mostly because the security systems they’re using are outdated. If I were T-Mobile right now, I’d make sure to check everything 100 times and find out exactly how the harmless file get posted online. Cause you can never know, can you?