Breaches
Hackers attacked a database at the University of California, Berkeley, and between October and April stole the personal details of current and former students who had health care coverage through the University's health service. 160 000 people are being notified of the breach. The hackers compromised a public internet server, which enabled them to then infiltrate databases stored on the same machine. They stole names, addresses, social security numbers, and immunization records.
India's Public Service Commission Government website was hacked, and programmed to deliver malware to unsuspecting visitors.
A Swedish hacker has been indicted for stealing source code from Cisco, in addition to breaking into NASA's computers.
LexisNexis notified 32 000 people that their names, birth dates and social security numbers may have been stolen by hackers and used to set up fake credit cards.
Research
Researchers hacked a botnet called Torpig, and retrieved 70Gb of data stolen from users, including 56 000 passwords.
Others at Finjan found a huge botnet operating out of the Ukraine, controlling almost two million machines.
Another group found data about launch procedures for US ground-to-air defense missiles on a hard drive that they purchased on eBay. Oops.
Cyberwar
The Head of US Strategic Command wants to unify the United States' offensive and defensive cyberspace efforts under a single commander.
The South Koreans think that the North Koreans are operating a cyber warfare unit. Elsewhere in Asia, Sri Lankan military and government websites were compromised by suspected activists.
Analysts predict Apple will begin recommending that its users install security software within the next 18 months, as the platform becomes increasingly popular and attracts the attention of malware writers. However, malware writers apparently still have some work to do.
Anti-malware
ScanSafe's latest global threat report said that on average, 20% of malware attacks were zero day threats in the latest quarter. At their peak, zero day attacks accounted for 58% of the total, which the firm says bodes badly for products that exclusively take a signature-based approach to malware protection.
Being pertinent of this general trend, Kaspersky patented a technology that uses heuristics to evaluate the likelihood of software being malicious based on its behavior during emulation.
Still, the Moscow-based anti-malware firm is still seen as a challenger in the latest Gartner endpoint protection magic quadrant. Out in front: Sophos, McAfee, Trend Micro and Symantec.
The US has the largest percentage of botnet-infected machines, according to McAfee's latest Global Threats Report.
Law
Lawmakers want to regulate peer to peer programs, forcing them to provide a clearer warning to users that their files may be shared. But the wording is broad enough that it could encompass many other types of program too, say reports.