Monday Morning News Kick Off: Sega Reveals Data Breach Affecting 1.3 Million Users; LulzSec Declares War; and Another Sony Breach

Written on June 20, 2011 – 1:05 pm | by Jasmine Haller

Welcome to the Monday Morning News Kick Off post from the ITAC blog. We surely sound like a broken record when we say that this is an unprecedented era of data breaches. Ever try typing in data breach, into a Google News search? Its frankly astounding what is happening out there. Speaking of major breaches, Sega was breached, LulzSec declared war against government and big businessoh, and Sony had another breach. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Sega Reveals Data breach Affecting 1.3 Million Users Sega says personal data from 1.3 million members of its online network were swiped in a breach, Reuters reports. Although the video game publisher says credit card data is safe, information such as names, birthdates, e-mail addresses and encrypted passwords were compromised. The online network Sega Pass has been shut down to bolster security. We are deeply sorry for causing trouble to our customers. We want to work on strengthening security, said Yoko Nagasawa, a Sega spokeswoman, in the Reuters report. Check out the full USA Today story here.

Lulzsec and Anonymous Declare Open War Against All Governments and Fat Cats Lulzsec and Anonymous have just declared full open war against all governments, banks and big corporations in the world. They are calling all hackers in the world to unite. Their objective is to fully expose all corruption and dark secrets: Salutations Lulz LizardsAs were aware, the government and whitehat security terrorists across the world continue to dominate and control our Internet ocean. Sitting pretty on cargo bays full of corrupt booty, they think its acceptable to condition and enslave all vessels in sight. Our Lulz Lizard battle fleet is now declaring immediate and unremitting war on the freedom-snatching moderators of 2011. Wow. Check out the full Gizmodo post here.

In Sony’s 20th Breach In Two Months, Hackers Claim 177,000 Sony Emails Compromised Sony’s unprecedented spree of security breaches in the last two months may be finally cooling off, as profit- and attention-seeking hackers move on to other vulnerable targets. But it’s not quite over yet. Over the weekend the Lebanese hacker Idahc announced that he had gained access to 177,000 emails through a SQL injection vulnerability on Sony Pictures’ French website.

Password Security Remains the Weakest Link Even After Big Data Breaches Organizations should be implementing several measures to prevent cyber-attackers from stealing sensitive, confidential data. Despite repeated reminders to select strong passwords and not to reuse them across Websites and services, online users continue to be frighteningly lax in their password security, according to a recent analysis of leaked passwords. Security experts recommend taking a multilayered approach to security. Instead of relying on a single point of failure, organizations should be implementing several mechanisms to make it harder for cyber-attackers to steal sensitive, confidential data, said Mike Yaffe, government security strategist at Core Security.

Netflix Outage Not Caused by Hackers Netflix, the Webs top video rental service but one with a history of suffering outages, saw another multihour blackout last night. The site seems to have gone down for about three or four hours last night, according to reports from those posting to Twitter. Netflix is traditionally tight-lipped about the causes of its malfunctions and this time is no exception. Good morning, wrote Steve Swasey, Netflixs spokesman. It was a technical issue that we fixed.The good news is that Netflix wasnt taken out by marauding hackers. Sony, Sega, and a number of other business and government sites have been hit by hackers in a high-profile spate of cyberattacks this spring, and some in the blogosphere speculated that Netflix may have succumbed to a similar attack. .

Free App Protects Facebook Accounts from Hackers Two University of California, Riverside graduate students and a company run by an alumnus of the school have partnered to develop a free Facebook application that detects spam and malware posted on users walls and news feeds. Md Sazzadur Rahman and Ting-Kai Huang, both Ph.D. students in computer science at the Bourns College of Engineering, created MyPageKeeper.org to provide real-time protection from viruses and phishing and spam campaigns for the 700 million users of Facebook.

String of Cyber Attacks Threat to U.S. Security? Japanese video game developer Sega announced Sunday that hackers broke into its database and stole the personal information of more than one million customers. The breach, CBS News Correspondent Elaine Quijano reports, is just the latest in a string of cyber-attacks on corporations, government contractors, and even the CIA. Last week, computer hackers forced a shutdown of the CIAs public website for more than two hours. It claims no sensitive information was at risk, but Internet security experts say it was still a huge embarrassment for the for the governments top spy agency.

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