Internet Security Magazine

Microsoft has warned customers that their financial data such as credit card information may have been compromised by hackers who attacked the company's online store in India earlier this month.The company had earlier described the hack, in which user names and passwords had been leaked, as a "limited compromise". The site which is run by a third-party service provider has been criticized for bad security practices, such as saving data in plain text.The store, which was defaced by hackers who claimed to be Chinese, is still unavailable. The hackers also released images of what appeared to be lists of users' names and passwords."Upon further detailed investigation of the third-party service provider managing Microsoft Store India, Microsoft has determined that financial information may have been exposed for some online store customers," the company said in a statement on Tuesday. "We have notified all potentially impacted customers and have provided additional guidance and resources to help protect their accounts," it added.India has long-standing border disputes with China and Pakistan, and the friction is reflected on social networks, and in hacks of websites on both sides of the borders, including a high-profile hack of the website of India's Central Bureau of Investigation.The hackers of the Microsoft website, who called themselves EvilShadow Team, said they wanted to get attention from Microsoft, and put up an image of China's flag on the altered main page. More...

Cloud technology is emerging as a viable option for companies that want to cut costs, increase agility or augment their own IT resources without building out new infrastructure -- or all of the above. But deciding which type of service is the best fit for your specific needs and ensuring the new cloud offerings play nice with your existing application mix is a challenge, to say the least.More companies are running head-on into these challenges nonetheless. A study published last year by PricewaterhouseCoopers found that 41 percent of security and IT respondents said their organizations have already implemented cloud computing, most going with SaaS offerings.To plot your cloud strategy, analysts and other experts say you should start by looking at your own needs, then work outward to see how cloud platforms, products and vendors can help. Pay heed to fundamentals -- the why, what, and how of your own situation -- by following a 3-step process:Assess your needs and goals
Set your application strategy, Identify challenges
Then you'll be better prepared to see how well today's industry offerings match up.Assess Needs and GoalsWhy do you want to make a move? Cutting or conserving costs is an obvious starting point."Probably the biggest challenge for CIOs is the facilities side of our business, all the switches and servers and routers and storage for the data centers; the thickness of all that within our own facilities, and the cascading costs that go along," says Mike Lucas, CIO for Hogan Lovells law firm. "There are opportunities to do this differently and benefit, especially now that we have greater market penetration by providers and the economies of scale start taking effect."The Betty Mills Company, an online retailer of office supplies and janitorial products, decided to move to the cloud rather than spend more than $100,000 for a data center upgrade. IT director Vlad Shalit said the fully redundant, 20-plus server configuration was designed to run at about 60 percent capacity, leaving headroom for unexpected spikes, such as when the swine flu epidemic hit.. More...