The California Department of Public Health has issued its findings in the UCLA celebrity medical records snooping case.  The department found 14 more people snooped into the records of famous people including Farrah Fawcett, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife Maria Shriver.  This brings the total to 68 people including physicians, nurses, administrative staff and one volunteer.

Why hack into a server when you can simply steal the damn thing.  This is exactly what happened to a Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) server containing 159,000 customer accounts, after it went missing during a branch office rennovation.

Cyber crimes have evolved from hackers fighting against the views of government to sophisticated identity theft, breaking into banks and various criminal activities. So far, local police organizations have been losing a lot of time to recover data from such machines, and they need all the help they can get. Now Microsoft is joining the fight.

It is a rare thing when an anti-virus company raises an alert about a widespread trojan virus. However, that is exactly the case with the new trojan named Downloader-UA.h, with a million infections stopped by McAffee alone. This trojan is spreading through file-sharing networks, so caution is advised.

Several hundred to possibly a thousand laptops are missing from the United States State Department, according to an internal audit.  Many of the laptops likely contain classified information and as many as 400 computers belonged to the Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program which provides counterterrorism training to other nations.

Secret agents have apparently been remotely scanning and decrypting electrical signals since World War II, according to a newly declassified NSA document.  Titled “TEMPEST: A Signal Problem”, the document describes leaky signals broadcasting from teletype machines would cause nearby sensors to spike – those signals could then be translated into keystrokes.  Known as TEMPEST, this phenomenon was mostly ignored by the United States in the following years, but it appears the Soviet Union, Japan and other countries developed TEMPEST scanning into an art form and used it against the USA.

You are concerned about spam and viruses? You ain’t seen nothing yet, believe researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC): A next phase of more sophisticated viruses may not only exist in software, but may be deeply embedded in hardware, or what the scientists describe as ““malicious circuits”.

The initial uproar over news of Microsoft’s forensic USB thumb-drive appears to be misplaced.  Microsoft has confirmed that the drive is just a compilation of publically available tools and adds that the USB-based toolkit does not “backdoor” or bypass any of Window’s security features.

An unclassified government PowerPoint presentation documenting Chinese counterfeiting of Cisco routers has been published on the net.  The Federal Bureau of Investigation document was produced on January 11, 2008 and discusses how counterfeit routers, switches and interface cards make it inside of American companies and government organizations.

The Department of Homeland Security has ceased operating its virtual fence near Tucson Arizona because of complaints by Border Patrol officers.  The 28-mile fence had been touted as a high-tech way to detect and capture hundreds of illegal immigrants that cross the area every day, but the system couldn’t quickly alert officers to the crossing.  Furthermore, DHS complained that the remote controlled cameras couldn't be turned quickly enough.

When PayPal's information security chief recently outlined new measures the company will take to battle phishing attacks and online frauds, it became evident that Apple's Safari browser lacks certain basic security features. Some predicted PayPal will block Safari users from accessing the online payment service altogether. A company spokesperson now reassured users that this wasn't the case. However, there are no security features in Safari to protect users from online scams and identity theft.