Review of 2006: Total recall
- Article 6 of 33
- SC Magazine, December 2006
It's been a good year for some and a bad one for Microsoft. And with so many mergers, it has changed the sector. Rob Buckley looks back.
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Happily, Carnegie Mellon researchers were able to reassure the world that certain kinds of hackers are few and far between: they determined that 70 per cent of DoS attacks originate from a mere 50 sources.
OCTOBER
Acquisitions were again the name of the game. McAfee picked up Citadel Security for $60 million (£31 million and Onigma for $20 million (£11 million). St Bernard Software acquired Singlefin. BT bought US company Counterpane for more than £11 million, making security guru Bruce Schneier a BT employee for the first time. Meanwhile, Sourcefire decided to launch its IPO.
As if to prove that security is only ever as good as its weakest link, a single compromised PC was found to be the open door that let cyber attackers wreak havoc at online broker E-Trade. Thieves were able to conduct fraudulent transactions that cost the company $18 million (£9 million) during its third quarter. TD Ameritrade had to cover $4 million (£2 million) of identity fraud in the same period.
Oracle released 101 security fixes, the largest critical patch update in more than a year, but even that couldn't steal the thunder from Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7, which was found to have security flaws within hours of its release.
The most interesting new threat was SpamThru, a Trojan, that was able to use pirated anti-virus software to scan for other malware and disable it. It also used a custom p2p protocol to share information with other infected machines.
So 2006 draws to a close; but some things don't change. At the time of writing, Nationwide admitted losing customer data on, you guessed it, a stolen company laptop.
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