Stories by: Ellen Messmer

Researchers at a university in Bochum, Germany claim to have cracked encryption algorithms of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) that are used to secure certain civilian satellite phone communications.

Why do some enterprise managers decide to brave their way into the new and unknown of cloud-based services? Sometimes it's simply because the old technology just isn't working out that well anymore.

Symantec is in an ongoing fight against hackers in the group Anonymous that last January attempted to extort a payment of around $50,000 from Symantec in exchange for not publicly posting stolen Symantec source code they had stolen for various older Symantec security products dating to 2006.

An in-depth study of data-breach problems last year where hackers infiltrated 312 businesses to grab gobs of mainly customer payment-card information found the primary way they got in was through third-party vendor remote-access applications or VPN for systems maintenance.

Can industry heavyweights Google, PayPal, Microsoft and AOL -- along with 11 others in high-tech such as Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as the financial world's Bank of America and Fidelity Investments -- succeed in stopping phishing attacks right in their tracks? In uniting behind an effort called DMARC.org unveiled today, the group says it can through policy-based steps filter out spoofed email that attackers use for phishing.

It was another busy week for hactivists attacking the online targets of their ire. This time, hackers under the banner AntiSec appeared to have hacked the website of OnGuardOnline.gov, the U.S. government's online security website, in protest against the much-railed-against legislation Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) as well as other bills regarding intellectual protection. Similarly, the group Anonymous is believed to be behind the distributed denial-of-service attack on Thursday that brought down the European Parliament's website in what is thought to be retaliation for European support for the shutdown of the Megaupload file-sharing site the week before. Anonymous also opposes a treaty being ratified in Europe now called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. That deals with infringement of intellectual property rights.

Encryption keys on smartphones can be stolen via a technique using radio waves, says one of the world's foremost crypto experts, Paul Kocher, whose firm Cryptography Research will demonstrate the hacking stunt with several types of smartphones at the upcoming RSA Conference in San Francisco next month.

Though wariness about the perceived lack of security in cloud-based services is often voiced, there are some situations where the opposite is the case. Some businesses mindful of security say the cloud services that are important to them have done a lot of work to meet their expectations about security.

Angered by the move by federal authorities to shut down the popular website Megaupload on charges it illegally shared movies, TV shows and e-books, hackers said to be working on behalf of the hactivist group Anonymous late yesterday launched denial-of-service attacks against a number of websites, including that of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

The bring your own device (BYOD) phenomenon is sweeping through the enterprise, and some businesses have embraced it with gusto, offering stipends to employees to use their own mobile devices for work.