Online fraud is rising “exponentially,” with the largest number of attacks originating from Eastern Europe and Russia. That’s according to Adrian Leppard, head of City of London Police, who admitted that the police were struggling to keep up with increasingly sophisticated internet criminals.
Advisen reports that half of all fraud in Britain, which currently costs the country £70 billion a year, is conducted online. Many of the victims are wealthy retired people conned into fraudulent schemes, losing £25k on average. In addition, there is a lot of evidence that alQaeda are using the proceeds of online crime to fund their attacks.
As the police force faces more budget cuts, many of the 800 specialist internet crime officer jobs may be lost. Leppard said that he worried that as online crime and fraud increases, Britain’s capacity to tackle the problem will be even more diminished.
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A small New England cafe chain believes hackers may have breached its payment system. The Works Bakery Cafe is in the process of telling customers that their data may be at risk after it discovered its point-of-sale computers had been infected. Advisen reports that the hack is part of a larger trend in data security. 
The New York Times says that it has repeatedly come under the attack of Chinese hackers over the last four months, reports the BBC. The newspaper says that the attacks coincided with a report it ran which claimed Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao had amassed a multi-billion dollar fortune. Jiabao was not accused of wrongdoing but according to the BBC, China is sensitive about reports on its leaders’ wealth. 
The Pentagon has recently announced that it will dramatically increase its cyber-security staff to combat the rapid influx in cyber attacks against government agencies and critical infrastructure. Cyber Command, which started just 3 years ago, now has 900 military and civilian staff members. That number will increase fivefold, up to 4,900 staff members. 
An external hard drive containing the names, Social Insurance Numbers, birthdays and addresses of nearly 600,000 clients of the Canada Student Loans Program has disappeared. Human Resources and Skill Development Canada (HRSDC) announced the privacy breach on January 11th.
The French Euromillions website, operated by Francaise des Jeux (FDJ), recently fell victim to religious hackers after its homepage was replaced by a passage from the Koran condemning gambling. The verses call games of chance “works of the devil” that are intended to turn people away from God. The message appeared for the better part of a day and did not affect the Euromillions game directly, nor was any data lost or stolen. The FDJ said that no other websites were affected.
A recent cyber attack on South Carolina’s Department of Revenue has affected more than three quarters of the state’s population. The hack resulted in the theft of 3.6 million Social Security numbers and nearly 400k debit and credit card numbers. 
Software provider SSP has suspended its service on aggregator websites after an attack on its integration with Google Compare. The attack affected users of Google’s new comparison website for car insurance. SSP’s software is used on a range of aggregator websites such as Google Compare, Comparethemarket.com, Gocompare.com, Confused.com and Moneysupermarket.com.
Customers who shopped in various locations of the US bookstore giant, Barnes & Noble, may have had their credit card details stolen by hackers. 63 stores were affected, including some of the company’s busiest locations in New York, Chicago, Miami and San Diego. The hackers got the information by breaking into the keypads in front of registers where customers swipe their cards and enter their PINs.
We usually think of hack attacks for financial gains taking the form of copying credit card and other financial information from companies’ servers and selling it on the black market. But new tactics are coming about – tactics which cyber criminals are using with increasing frequency. Hackers are now beginning to steal data from companies and hold it until a hefty ransom is paid.