Latest IT Security News and Updates from this Week
The Largest Cyber-Attack hits China
On 25th August China suffered the largest cyber-attack ever. The news was posted on the website of the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). Reportedly, the attack begun at 2 pm local time paralyzing many websites in the country, before it got worse by 4 pm. The attack was a distributed denial of service (DDoS). Hackers use this attack to render their target unreachable or unusable for its intended users. Flooding a website with traffic to make it unreachable to users, is a common type of DDoS attack. Read the complete news here.
Government Employees to bid Adieu to Gmail Service
Officials of Indian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology have expressed their plan to disallow the use of Gmail service across all government sectors. A formal notification might be sent to around 5 lac employees informing them about this measure. This step aims to tighten security of classified government data in the wake of cyber spying activities carried out by the US. Gmail, would most probably, replaced by the official email service provided by the India’s National Informatics Centre. For more on this news, follow this link.
Tata Motors, ECIL, ISRO, and BARC Targeted by Hackers
News are up that the website of the Electronics Corporation of India Ltd and Tata Motors got compromised. Furthermore, documents of communication betweem Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) and Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) were also leaked and put up on a random website by the hacker. A spokesperson from ISRO, however, has rubbished all such claims. Read the entire story here.
Kids, we are watching you!
Students of the Glendale Unified School District in Southern California will soon have people snooping their activities on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. The school has hired a company called Geo Listening for the job. According to them, this program will help them reach out to students in trouble, and also track down online miscreants. Geo Listening, also called Big Geo looks for cyber bullying, substance abuse, and truancy among other things. However, as helpful as this service is, it might also be seen as a tool for breaching privacy. Read more on this here.
Phishing Alert: Watch out for Secure Google Docs!
Phishing, despite being an old school online scam trick, has not lost its charm. Apparently, Gmail users are being targeted by a large scale phishing attack. People are receiving messages claiming to contain a “Secure Document” sent via Google Docs. The email contains a link that is supposed to take the user to the said document. Analysts have said that, clicking the link would take the target to a fake Google docs page, which is hosted in Thailand. This is a phishing page that asks the victim for their Google login credentials. This data, if provided, will be sent to an external server and finally to the hacker. Interestingly, this phishing Google doc page also notifies that it will accept login credentials of other email accounts, as well.
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