Contracts, industrial drawings and logins were all stolen in the attacks Oil, gas and defence firms in Norway have been hit by a series of sophisticated hack attacks.Industrial secrets and information about contract negotiations had been stolen, said Norway's National Security Agency (NSM).
It said 10 firms, and perhaps many more, had been targeted in the biggest wave of attacks to hit the country.
Norway is the latest in a growing list of nations that have lost secrets and intellectual property to cyber thieves.
The attackers won access to corporate networks using customised emails with viruses attached which did not trigger anti-malware detection systems.
Targeted attacksThe NSM said the email messages had been sent to specific named individuals in the target firms and had been carefully crafted to look like they had come from legitimate sources.
Many of the virus-laden emails were sent while the companies were in the middle of negotiations over big contracts.
It said user names, passwords, industrial drawings, contracts and documents had been stolen and taken out of the country.
The NSM believes the attacks are the work of one group, based on its analysis of the methods used to target individuals, code inside the viruses and how the data was extracted.
The agency said it was publishing information about the attacks to serve as a warning and to encourage other targeted firms to come forward.
"This is the first time Norway has revealed extensive and wide computer espionage attacks," the NSM said in a statement.
Singled outIt said it found out about the attacks when "vigilant users" told internal IT security staff, who then informed the agency.
However, the NSM said, it was likely that many of the companies that had been hit did not know that hackers had penetrated their systems and stolen documents.
Security firms report that many other nations and industrial sectors have been targeted by data thieves in recent months.
The chemical industry, hi-tech firms and utilities appear to have been singled out.
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The success of phones running Google's Android software has meant cyber-attacks have risen 472 per cent in just three months - from cyber-spying apps to apps that add to your phone bill
HTC's Evo 4G handset runs Google's popular Android software: But the internet giant's anything-goes approach to its app store has led to an increase in cyber attacks on users
They're not about products; they're about the threat. 
We'd love to have you along, but places are strictly limited so you must register if you want to come. 
Google is offering to stop mapping wireless access point location data, granting network owners worldwide the choice to opt out from its Wi-Fi geolocation mapping. This move follows a decision by the Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA) that the process is in violation of laws in the Netherlands.
"The method seems simple, but it is fraught with problems," writes Mr. Rash. "Not the least of these problems … is that a lot of people have no idea how to change the SSID on their router. How many people? Well, if you're in a populated area, look for access points on your laptop. Note how many SSIDs are named ?linksys’ or ?belkin.’ Those are all people who bought their router at the store, plugged it in and started using it. These people likely don't know what an SSID is, much less how to change it."
But, asks Sophos’s Graham Cluley, "What happens if another net firm wants to produce its own rival to Google Street View, and sends their camera-equipped tricycle down the country lanes of Oxfordshire?"
A zero-day vulnerability is causing BIND 9 DNS servers to crash across the internet. The flaw, described as an "as-yet unidentified network event", appears to be a denial of service vulnerability being exploited in-the-wild. The flaw affects all supported versions of BIND.
In the face of an ocean of users demanding their personal data as required by European Union law, Facebook has sharply constricted the amount of data it's handing over.
Mr. Schrems told ITworld that he’s exchanged e-mails with Richard Allan, Facebook's director of European public policy, who’s indicated that Facebook is contemplating a system modification that would allow a more in-depth batch of information if the agency finds fault in the company's current strategy.
It has been reported that a SCADA systems failure at a municipal water processing plant may have been caused by hackers infiltrating their network.
Police detained a 16-year-old on Oct. 10 in relation to "a suspected attempt to encourage others to commit a distributed denial-of-service attack," according to a spokesman from the cybercrime unit who was quoted in a report from the Associated Press. The spokesman also said that the teenager is out on bail and has not yet been charged.
It’s not hard to find a teenager who knows how to launch a DDoS nowadays. As Sophos’s Graham Cluley has written, many Internet users have been urged to voluntarily join a botnet by downloading a DDoS attack tool called LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon, described in this detailed analysis by Sophos's Vanja Svajcer).
Earlier this week the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released the first drafts of two new privacy standards aimed at simplifying and standardising how websites read and comply with web users’ privacy settings.
Back in June the European Commission told the technology industry in no uncertain terms that if it didn’t agree a Do Not Track standard by the midde of 2012, it would be forced to act.
Since tracking tends to rely on cookies you might think that deleting them would be enough to prevent it. Sadly it's not. Researchers have shown that advertisers can work around users who delete their cookies by using Flash cookies or HTML 5 storage for the same purpose. Most creepily they can even resurrect delete cookies zombie-like using ETags.