Weekly News Roundup: September 27, 2013

Some news highlights from around the world this week including insight from Mako CEO Bill Farmer on cybercrime in New Zealand, finding the silver lining in a data breach, and how fraudsters are using tin foil to attack businesses in Kansas City:

The New Zealand Herald – Bill Farmer: Cyber Crime Is Here – Bill Farmer from Mako raises awareness about the prevalence of cyber crime in New Zealand, and how many SMBs remain unprepared (or even naive) about the threat posed to their businesses by modern, professional hackers and fraudsters.

Dark Reading – Establishing The New Normal After A Breach – Worst case scenario: you’ve been breached. What happens next? Some security professionals claim such an incident can be good news in the long run for a business’ risk posture. For all of the problems that breaches bring, they also present a learning opportunity and potential for developing better processes that improve the day-to-day effectiveness of IT security. But that growth can occur only if organizations spend the time to thoroughly analyze the event to find the fundamental risk factors that contributed to a compromise.

The Kansas City Star – Aluminum foils security, shields credit-card crooks from detection – Police in Kansas City are investigating a spree of tin foiling attacks on local businesses. The method is simple: climb on the roof, and wrap the dish’s feed horn in tin foil to block the signal. For stores that process card payments by satellite only, this knocks their connection offline, and the POS system is in ‘offline mode’, where it will accept cards and save the transaction for later processing when the connection is back. The trouble is, if you’ve got a stolen or overdrawn card, there’s no way for the POS to know until it gets its connection back – by which time the fraudsters will be long gone. You can see a photo of the ‘foiled’ dish at the link above.