Cybercrime

One of the realities of news that happens at Internet-speed is that it may not be wholly accurate. Much of what has come out about the Target breach contains factual errors that may not seem obvious, especially as they are repeated by many news outlets. So let us take a moment to examine some of the more common myths that have been flying around.

Hackers have stolen documents relating to law enforcement inquiries, through phishing attacks on employee emails, Microsoft has announced.

Arts and crafts retail chain Michaels has revealed that it may have been the victim of a "data security attack", similar to those at Target and Neiman Marcus in recent weeks.

Luxury retailer Neiman Marcus has revealed that a breach which led to customer payment cards being used for fraud after shopping in its stores was far worse than first revealed - with 1.1 million cards affected over several months.

Banks around the world face a looming deadline to upgrade their ATMS - 95% of machines worldwide run Windows XP, which Microsoft will cease to support on April 8. Just 15% of America's ATMs are expected to upgrade by that point.

A Californian blogger was among victims of a malware attack which targeted critics of the communist state in Vietnam, as well as staff at U.S. privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The ‘magnetic stripe’ credit cards used by American banks should be replaced with the more secure chip-and-PIN systems standard in Europe and around the world to prevent further attacks, according to Visa, Mastercard, JP Morgan and government officials.

Cisco claims in its report that cybercrime is now a global, professional industry - and there is a worldwide shortage of professionals able to defend against such attacks, with new technologies in malware meaning that there is a shortfall of a million IT professionals.

The computer giant announced the change of policy in an official blog post in which it said that although XP was no longer “a supported operating system”, security updates would continue until July 2015.