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Islamic Jihad’s cyber-war brigades

The Palestinian Islamist movement, Islamic Jihad, has added a cyber-war division to its armed Al-Quds Brigades.

It was a response to years of attacks by Israeli hackers, and according to the Brigades spokesman, Abu Hamza, it equals the playing field in cyber-space.

"The Israeli's have worked very hard the past few years on monitoring all the Palestinian websites, especially those of Islamic Jihad and Al-Quds Brigades," Hamza told MENASSAT. "They (Israeli hackers) hacked these websites and erased them from the electronic boards or even added indecent pictures to them," he said.

Study: Majority of data breaches unnoticed

More than half of the data breaches on hundreds of enterprise systems go undetected and are caused by general negligence and lax security, according to a report by Verizon Business revealed late last week.

Verizon's 2008 Verizon Business Data Breach Investigations Report looked at some 500 cases between 2004 and 2007 where data were breached, resulting in more than 230 million compromised records.

The study revealed that 66 percent of the data breaches occurred due to incompetence and weak system fortitude. At least 75 percent of breaches evaded detection, with weeks, months and even years passing between incursion and discovery in 63 percent of the cases studied.

Stand by your beds - best of 2600 coming soon...

I've been an avid reader - and subscriber - to 2600, the hacker quarterly, for many years, so it's good to see that the `Best of 2600' book is being released shortly.

The book, which spans 24 years of hacking and phone phreaking history, is billed as a must-read for "anyone interested in the history of hacking or the evolution of the entities devoted to combat the effects of hackers."

The book is billed as detailing the (h)activities of Kevin Mitnick and Phiber Optik, to mention but a few industry luminaries, and the book promises to include more than a few features written by these uber-hackers.