Log in

Archive for March, 2010

St. Louis Police Bugged By Hackers

March 13th, 2010

The hackers have not spared even the police. Well atleast this is what you can say from the recent incident at St. Louis ! After the attack the information of about ‘24′ people has been compromised.

While the attack was targeted at several computers, in a sense the victims were lucky as only of the computers were impacted by its severity. This news was confirmed by the police department a couple of days back.

After the attack the following data of the victims has been reveraled:

Names
Addresses
Social security numbers of residents

The data of people involved in criminal incidents has been revealed. These are either witnesses, property owners or witnesses. The victims are being contacted by the investigators with an offer to pay for credit monitoring services along with advises to additional measures to protect their credit.

Investigators are contacting the victims, offering to pay for credit monitoring services and advising them of additional measures to protect their credit. No fraudulent activity has been reported.

There is no real confirmation as to when the attack happened, the department learned of the attack earlier this week, but investigators believe it occurred on Feb. 4 or 5. Now the team is working on improving computer security.

Get Protected Alertsec

Alertsec is the frontrunner in offering hard disk encryption as a fully managed service. We provide protection for all information stored on laptops and PCs in an easy, convenient, and cost-effective way. Check out our convenient and cost-effective computer security software for Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7.

No comments »

Posted in Encryption

Tags: alertsec full disk encryption

Behind the Scenes: A Look at Our Laptop Encryption Protection

March 6th, 2010

: Image via Wikipedia

Today we’re going to to do a little bit of self-introspection and try to demonstrate why we think Encryption is necessary in fast paced world and why it makes sense to use Alertsec’s encryption protection.

In a recent report yet again, McAfee which is a leading maker of Internet security software had given strong warning that there are many hackers who are targeting the intellectual property systems being used by the hackers. They also believe that it is time that the security focus is increased. This is the latest addition to the attacks on Google which revealed where they originated in China and resulted in theft of its intellectual property.

Infact, we always believe that the single most important asset for an organization is the information itself. With transition from Web1.0 to Web2.0 the deskops are being increasingly replaced the laptops and have become the major computational source.

The majority of the data loss occurs to due the loss or theft of the equipment. However, it can be easily controlled with the installation of a laptop encryption system. Essentially what it does is ensure that there is no loss or damage to the information or credentials.

According to the FBI, losses due to laptop theft totaled more than $6.7 million dollars in 2005. The Computer Security Institute/FBI Computer Crime & Security Survey found the average theft of a laptop to cost a company $89,000. Depending on the information kept on a laptop, lack of proper security precautions allows a thief to easily acquire such information as personal bookkeeping files, documents containing passwords, addresses, as well as employee and customer information stored on company laptops.

Nevertheless, statistics tips it is quite evident that there is big loss of laptops due to theft. Infact, we’ve also found out that as many as 1 in 10 laptops will be stolen during its lifetime.

We at Alertsec Xpress offer full disk encryption which is superior to other encryption methods when comparing security, performance, robustness and ease-of-use for both administrators and users.

Secure and Reliable
Secure disposal of old laptops
Transferable subscriptions
Convenient (24/7 Helpdesk)

Do check the technical specifications about our laptop encrpytion service here, we would be glad to hear from you.

Flawed Security Exposes Vital Software to Hackers (bits.blogs.nytimes.com)
Laptop Encryption Software: Laptop Tracking 75% Effective For Recovery? (alertboot.com)

No comments »

Posted in Encryption, Lawsuits and settlements

Hackers bypass Captcha

March 2nd, 2010

Do you remember those numbers that you enter for verification while signing up for a new yahoo account? Yes, we are talking about a CAPTCHA (pronounced /ˈkæptʃə/) which is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer.

Early CAPTCHAs such as these, generated by the...

Image via Wikipedia

While Captcha ensures security of critical data on the internet, 4 notorious miscreants from California had other ideas. The culprits who were identified as Kenneth Lowson, 40; Kristofer Kirsch, 37; and Joel Stevenson, 37, Faisal Nahdi, 36, were charged in the indictment.

What they did ?

These men who worked for Wiseguy Ticket Inc. hacked into the system of popular ticket sellers such as Ticketmaster, Tickets.com, MLB.com and MusicToday. They bought and resold over 1.5 million tickets to brokers in the New Jersey area. The equivalent value of fraud is estimated at $25 million. These were tickets of popular shows including Bruce Springsteen and Kenny Chesney concerts, also included were 2007 Major League Baseball playoff games at Yankee Stadium and Broadway productions of Wicked and The Producers.

How they did it ?

To provide un-biased access of tickets to popular events, the vendors such as Ticketmaster have put a limitations on the number of tickets that can be bought by an individual or a company. To execute this concept, online vendors have set up necessary software to which detects and prevents automated systems from dispensing bulk tickets in one go.

According to the government the employees at Wiseguy also worked with computer programmers in Bulgaria and developed a network of strong desktops which could be used to impersonate human beings. Evenutllay this lead to bombardment of tickets at the vendor’s place. Apparently, the culprits also had access to fake domain accounts & passworrds.

The Wiseguy team earned profited from the scheme by selling the tickets at a markup to the by charging its ticket brokers a percentage mark-up over the face value.

U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman said the tickets cost consumers an average of $30 a piece, with some premium seats going for more than $1,000, before they were turned over to a regular ticket broker at inflated prices. He also said, ‘Today’s indictment represents a significant step forward in the fight against those who use fraud to disrupt e-commerce and evade computer security’.

Infact this is not the first case were these guys have been caught. The charges also cites references to 42 additional counts of wire fraud; where unauthorized access to computer system has been gained resulting in damage to computers in the local commerce.

About Alertsec

Alertsec is the frontrunner in offering hard disk encryption as a fully managed service. We provide protection for all information stored on laptops and PCs in an easy, convenient, and cost-effective way. Check out our convenient and cost-effective computer security software for Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7.