Hackers attack world's largest jobs site

It’s striking how frequently there are stories about the insecurity of our personal information. There’s a few more today – here’s one, predictably about Monster, a job site.

What happen in monster is a fascinating story, if i want to put it in a sequencial order its difficult by i think i have done a fair work......

• 1.6 million entries in Monster's system – belonging to "several hundred thousand" members – were taken after the hackers logged in using the details of employers who routinely scour the site for prospective workers, according to Symantec, the security firm.

• The details, which included names, surnames, e-mail and home addresses, as well as phone numbers, were then used to send 'phishing' e-mails to members, apparently from Monster.com, encouraging them to download a tool known as 'Monster Job Seeker'.

• It was a malicious program known as a 'trojan', which encrypted the files on the victim's machine, making them inaccessible to the computer owner.
  

• Message was left requesting that money be paid to the attackers before the files – which could include photos and other personal documents – would be decrypted.

• It seems likely it was done over a period of time

Most computer vulnerabilities can be exploited in a variety of ways. Hacker attacks may use a single specific exploit, several exploits at the same time, a misconfiguration in one of the system components or even a backdoor from an earlier attack.

Due to this, detecting hacker attacks is not an easy task, especially for an inexperienced user. This article gives a few basic guidelines to help you figure out either if your machine is under attack or if the security of your system has been compromised. Keep in mind just like with viruses, there is no 100% guarantee you will detect a hacker attack this way.

Hackers attack computers every 39 seconds, according to new research.

The study, which investigated how exactly hackers crack computers, confirms those regularly issued warnings about password vulnerability. Experts advise longer passwords, regularly changed and not based on users' biographies, that mix letters and numerals and are hard to guess.

There is no credible intelligence to suggest a imminet threat to the homeland or our computing systems at this time.

The truth is that in hours of a machine being connected to the Internet, somebody will scan it with an automated vulnerability probing tool, looking for ways to get in. It may be somebody who is just curious to see what is on the machine, or a white hat from the other side of the world checking to see if the computer is secure. Of course, in real life you wouldn't want passing strangers stopping to check if your house or car were locked, and, if not, to go inside, look around, go through your possessions and leave a note saying 'Hi, I was here, your door was open, but don't mind me and BTW, fix your lock'. If you wouldn't want someone to do this to your house, you wouldn't want someone doing it to your computer. And there is no excuse for doing it to someone else's computer either.

Whatever the reasoning, be it 'to help others', 'security heads-up!', 'hooliganism' or 'criminal intent', hacking is a phenomenon which is deeply rooted in the world of computing and will probably never die.

There will always be people immature enough to abuse public resources, self-proclaimed 'Robin Hoods' and criminals hiding in the dark alleys of cyberspace.