This Week’s Bytes of the Latest IT Security News and Updates

Adobe Hacked – Data of 2.9 million Customers Compromised!
Adobe has announced in its blog of a major security breach that compromised the data of 2.9 million of its customers. According to the company’s chief security officer, the hacked data mainly included customer IDs, encrypted passwords, encrypted credit and debit numbers and their expiration dates. The company, however, assured that the hackers were not able to steal decrypted credit or debit card numbers. Hackers were also able to gain illegal access to the source codes of several Adobe products. Affected users will receive notifications about this incident, and the company is in the process of resetting the passwords of all affected accounts. Adobe has offered a one year complimentary membership in a credit monitoring service to customers whose credit and debit card numbers were compromised in the data breach. Read more about this news here in Adobe’s official blog.

Internet Explorer Exploit Could Spell Trouble
In a previous blog post we discussed a new security vulnerability, named “CVE-2013-3893”, that was found on all supported versions of IE. As of now, Microsoft has not released a permanent patch to fix the security flaw, and this might have given hackers an upper hand. News are up that an attack code capable of exploiting the vulnerability has been integrated into an open-source testing tool. In other words, this code is not only available to security researchers but even hackers as well. Because of this, analysts are expecting a rise in attacks against Internet Explorer users. We advise our readers to avoid using IE until any permanent patch is released by Microsoft. Source: news.cnet.com

No Skype, WhatsApp, Viber, and Tango for three Months in Pakistan’s Sindh
Earlier it was YouTube that got banned in Pakistan, now it is time for some more Internet communication services to go into hibernation. The Sindh province of Pakistan has expressed its intention of putting a 3-month ban on Skype, WhatsApp, Viber, and Tango. The government believes that banning these and other similar services, will help them improve security against terrorism and criminal activities in the province. This decision, however, has not been welcomed by a Pakistani Internet advocacy group Bolo Bhi, and other organizations and activists. They labelled this decision as violation of the citizens’ fundamental rights to communication. This ban is nothing new for Pakistan; YouTube has been banned for a year now. Read more about this story here.

Facebook Posts can be edited, but Runs the Risk of Being Misused
Unlike earlier, you can now edit or tweak your posts on Facebook, without deleting it or losing its comments or ‘likes’. Furthermore, any changes in the post would not be notified to other users. But the post would be shown as ‘edited’. While this new feature sounds good and convenient, it does run the risk of being misused. For instance, a funny post that has attracted likes and comments, may be edited to something inappropriate. Therefore, the likes and comments that have not changed, may leave room for misinterpretation or misunderstanding. Reportedly, this edit post feature is not yet applicable to business pages. Follow this link to know more about this development.

Rajiv Singha