From DarkReading

Dutch authorities take unusual tack in directly contacting machines infected by 'Bredolab' botnet

No doubt 2010 will go down as the year of the botnet takedown as yet another botnet met its demise this week: Dutch authorities announced that they have struck down the Bredolab botnet and arrested its alleged mastermind, marking the fourth consecutive major botnet to go down this year in coordinated, team efforts to root out these vehicles of cybercrime.

Bredolab, which had some 30 million bot-infected machines in its army worldwide, was a spamming botnet known for pushing fake antivirus, phony pharmaceuticals, spreading other Trojan malware, and stealing the victim machine's financial information. The botnet had the capacity and capability to infect 3 million bots a month, according to the Dutch High Tech Crime Team, which led the investigation. Bredolab had sent some 3.6 billion emails containing its malware by the end of 2009.

From DarkReading

Fraud-related losses rose 20 percent to $1.7 billion in the past year, Kroll study says
Incidence of theft of information and electronic data at global companies has overtaken physical theft for the first time, according to a study released yesterday.

According to the latest edition of the Kroll Annual Global Fraud Report, the amount lost by businesses to fraud rose from $1.4 million to $1.7 million per $1 billion of sales in the past 12 months -- an increase of more than 20 percent.

From C/Net News

This time around, Facebook may actually have seen its privacy Watergate: A report in The Wall Street Journal on Monday found that the phenomenal amount of personal information that Facebook members put in their profiles may indeed have been sold extensively to marketers, advertisers, and data collectors. The big question, appropriately enough, is what Facebook knew and when did it know it.

From DarkReading

The directors of National Intelligence and the FBI say tech-savvy extremists pose a growing threat, setting the stage for a national debate over the need for Internet eavesdropping

Two top intelligence officials last week warned that tech-savvy terrorists are using the Web to recruit for, plan, facilitate, and even accelerate their criminal acts. Their comments set the stage for what's likely to become a heated national debate over wiretapping the Internet.

From Information Week

The continued prevalence of infected computers has Microsoft arguing for computer quarantines.

At the RSA Conference 2010 in London on Wednesday, Microsoft said that it had cured 6.5 million botnet-infected computers during the second quarter of 2010, twice the number identified and removed during the same period in 2009.

The United States has the dubious honor of being the country with the most botnet infections. Microsoft identified 2.2 million computers compromised by botnet malware in the U.S. during the second quarter of the year, four times more than Brazil, where 550,000 botnet infections were identified.

From C/Net News

Kids are sharing too much online, and social networks aren't doing enough to protect them.

Those were the sentiments expressed by parents in a study released yesterday by Common Sense Media. Two nationwide polls (PDF) conducted in August, one of adults and one of teens, found that 92 percent of parents believe their kids are sharing too much information about themselves online. And 85 percent said they're more concerned about online privacy than they were five years ago.

Three out of four parents also believe social networks aren't doing a good job of protecting the privacy of kids, while 71 percent of adults in general feel the same.

From Computer World

Steps up blame campaign, denies that malware has delayed nuclear reactor startup

Iran today made its strongest statement yet that it believes a Western plot is behind the Stuxnet worm that has infected tens of thousands of computers in the country, including some at its sole nuclear power plant.

In a Tuesday press briefing, Iran's foreign ministry spokesman, Ramin Mehmanparast, blamed unnamed Western countries for creating and distributing the worm.

From Dark Reading

Cyber Storm III under way; biennial cybersecurity exercise aims to test preparedness

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- No, the U.S. isn't under cyberattack. But this week, government and private security response groups began exercises to see what would happen if it were.

Cyber Storm III, the third in a series of large-scale simulations that test the nation's cyber defenses every other year, is under way. And the simulators aren't messing around.

From Dark Reading

Worm sheds light on ongoing targeted attacks against critical infrastructure, and Iranian news reports infections among nuclear power plant's employee machines

While the Stuxnet worm attack has raised the bar for targeted attacks on the critical infrastructure, it's not the first time the power grid has been in the bull's eye. Attacks against these systems are actually quite common -- it's just that they are mostly kept under wraps and rarely face public scrutiny like Stuxnet has.