Government officials say that Chinese hackers who breached Google’s defenses were able to access years’ worth of U.S. law enforcement and spying information. As reported by The Washington Post, current and former U.S. officials say that when Chinese hackers broke into Google servers in 2010, although the tech giant claimed they were targeting human rights activist information, the intruders were actually after a database which contained years’ worth of information relating to U.S. surveillance and law enforcement. At the time of the data breach, Google made no reference to the database, which seeded distrust and resulted in a dispute between the firm and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Source: http://www.zdnet.com/chinese-cyberattack-on-google-exposed-spy-data-us-officials-7000015653/

http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2013/may/internet-crime-in-2012/internet-crime-in-2012

Yahoo Japan, which has little to do with the Yahoo that’s buying Tumblr, has revealed that it believes some 22 million IDs may have been leaked in an attack that the company discovered and stopped as it happened. Yahoo Japan believes the attackers were attempting to get their hands on IDs and probably whatever else they could get their hands on. The company is unsure how much – if anything – got out. They intercepted the file containing the 22 million IDs while it was on Yahoo’s servers and it’s unclear if attackers were able to grab it or not. Yahoo cut off access as soon as it detected the intrusion.

Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Yahoo-Japan-May-Have-Leaked-22-Million-IDs-in-Attack-354574.shtml

There’s a war being fought every second, right under our noses and it effects everyone. It doesn’t involve any bombs or bloodshed — the targets are services we rely on daily that could virtually disappear with just a few key strokes. Security experts say it’s not a matter of “if” but “when” a cyber-terrorist attack or intrusion will take place on our critical infrastructure and the Puget Sound is a prime target. The Obama Administration released an unclassified alert regarding a cyber-attack last week, warning companies and local governments that handle critical infrastructure of a possible intrusion, even naming China and Iran as possibly perpetrators. “You have some of the best hi-tech companies in the world in the Puget Sound area,” says Howard Schmidt, the former Cyber Security Coordinator for the Obama Administration. “You have some of the better Cloud services then anywhere in the world here in the Puget Sound, you have some of the best military operations here, all concentrated here in the area and a population that supports it.”

Source: http://www.komonews.com/news/problemsolvers/Easiest-target-for-cyber-terrorists-Theres-no-firewall-for-stupidity-208261601.html?tab=video&c=y

That CCTV feed is just one of many inadvertently put online. Finding them has got much easier thanks to search engines such as Shodan that scour the web for them. It catalogues hundreds every day. “Shodan makes it easier to perform attacks that were historically difficult due to the rarity of the systems involved,” Alastair O’Neill from the Insecurety computer security research collective told the BBC. “Shodan lowers the cost of enumerating a network and looking for specific targets.” It is not just CCTV that has been inadvertently exposed to public scrutiny. Search engines are revealing public interfaces to huge numbers of domestic, business and industrial systems. Mr O’Neill and other researchers have found public control interfaces for heating systems, geo-thermal energy plants, building control systems and manufacturing plants. The most worrying examples are web-facing controls for “critical infrastructure” – water treatment systems, power plants and traffic control systems.
Source:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22524274

A previously unknown hacking group believed to be based in Iran has started cyber attacks inside the U.S., according to Mandiant Corp., a security company that’s linked China’s army to similar activity. The Iranian group emerged within the last six months and has infiltrated the networks of at least one U.S. corporation, Richard Bejtlich, Mandiant’s chief security officer, said in an interview in Washington today. “You’re starting to see the Iranians get more active,” Bejtlich said. “We’ve got at least one case where we think it’s Iran, and we think what they are doing is trying to gain some experience on a live network.”

Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-14/iran-based-hackers-traced-to-cyber-attack-on-u-s-company.html

Source: http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=14906

The hackers often struck late on Fridays, starting about a year ago, sending skeleton crews at more than a dozen European banks rushing to keep bombardments of digital gibberish from crashing their websites. Damaging as the bandwidth-choking attacks were, they were merely smokescreens. Once employees dropped their guard to fight one attack, hackers struck again, exploiting the openings to steal account information and create counterfeit debit cards. One attack was so fast that, within two hours, $9 million was withdrawn from automated teller machines in 46 cities, according to Francis deSouza, president of products and services for Symantec Corp (SYMC)., the Mountain View, California-based information security company that investigated the incidents.
Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-06/cheapest-way-to-rob-bank-seen-in-cyber-attack-like-hustle.html