hacking

Kenya’s cyber highway is not safe from virtual fraudsters and other malignant cyber crooks, industry experts have warned. They say unless the problem is addressed urgently, cyber crime will continue to prevail because it pays. The moment the first submarine fibre optic cable landed, local businesses became more accessible on the World Wide Web (www), attracting the attention of international hackers.

The tragedy here is that local businesses did not move with high speed to upgrade their information security systems to ward off international hackers from accessing their networks and databases, said IT security expert Lionel Mbogho, who has operated in the US for several years.

These companies are now prone to hefty financial losses through theft or data corruption.

A suburban Philadelphia school district remotely activates the cameras in school-provided laptops to spy on students in their homes, a lawsuit filed in federal court Tuesday alleged.

According to the lawsuit filed by a high school student and his parents, the Lower Merion School District of Ardmore, Pa. has spied on students and families by "indiscriminate use of and ability to remotely activate the Webcams incorporated into each laptop issued to students by the School District."

Approximately 1,800 students at the district's two high schools have been given laptops as part of a state- and federally-funded "one-to-one" student-to-laptop initiative.

Hackers in Europe and China successfully broke into computers at nearly 2,500 companies and government agencies over the last 18 months in a coordinated global attack that exposed vast amounts of personal and corporate secrets to theft, according to a computer-security company that discovered the breach.

The damage from the latest cyberattack is still being assessed, and affected companies are still being notified. But data compiled by NetWitness, the closely held firm that discovered the breaches, showed that hackers gained access to a wide array of data at 2,411 companies, from credit-card transactions to intellectual property.