An announcement was made today at Debian.org that gluck, one of several major Debian Project development computers had been compromised.

Details are sketchy but it appears that it may have been hosting the following services / repositories cvs, ddtp, lintian, people, popcon, planet, ports and release. They state they have taken the affected machine offline, as well as restricted access to other boxes on their domain pending investigation.

 ... a wolf in sheeps clothing? 

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Tests, ultimate frontier for securing code produced every day and night all over the world.

If only programmers could perform them. Instead, security researchers work day and night to check systems used every day by millions of users around the world releasing the necessary information to avoid users being abused by malicious files, be them programs or documents, which could deliver the keys to the system to an unknown attacker.

The U.S. State Department is now recovering from the effects of a large-scale computer break-ins targeting American headquarters and offices around the world.

 A particular tenacity against those offices dealing with China and North Korea is worth noticing. According to The Associated Press, investigators stated that U.S. information and passwords were stolen, and they discovered that  backdoors were implanted in unclassified government computers to allow crackers to return whenever they want.

Payroll processing giant  ADP recently disclosed that it was the target of several dedicated data breaches between Nov 2005 and Feb 2006. Statements by ADP to Baseline Magazine claim they were successfully targeted by an "unauthorized party impersonating company officers" at several different locations. ADP officials indicated that aproximatly 140,000 user account information was affected from clients Morgan Stanley, Fidelity Investments and UBS, although it appears that only investor names, addresses and share volumes of stock we compromised. While the data loss did not contain information commonly associated with identity theft, the data that was purloined can provide the perpetrators with valuable information.

 With so many data breaches being reported everyday, what makes this noteworthy?

Once again a case of stolen data , once again the affected party is the U.S. Defence Forces.

Specifically, this time we are dealing with a leak in the Navy Security System that allowed to steal personal details of over 100.000 naval and marine Corps aviators .Data have then been published on an Internet site, as it was discovered some days ago. This is the second time in two weeks a similar thing happens, as the online magazine Boston.com reported .

Identity theft is one of the fastest growing financial crimes.

Nearly 10 million Americans fall victim each year.Today on Zone-H .org, the complete chronology of Data Breaches  published by Privacy rights.org, the non profit consumer information and advocacy organization.

The following list conveys over 88.000 data records stolen in the United States between February 2005 and July 2006:Sensitive information including  data elements useful to  identity thieves, such as Social Security numbers, account numbers, and driver's license numbers, were exposed so far, drawing the attention to the fact that an implementation of security measure would be desirable in order to prevent theft both of governmental and private  data...