The Obama adminstration has unveiled plans to tackle various forms of transnational organized crime, including cybercrime and the theft of intellectual property.

Companies need to go beyond compliance with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) to ensure credit card safety, according to Phil Walston, vice president of development and product management at Layer 7 Technologies.

Zurich American Insurance Co., which is one of Sony’s insurers, is asking a New York state court to rule that the insurer does not have to pay Sony for class-action lawsuit claims related to its massive data breach.

The New Zealand Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA) has revealed that a call-calling telephony scam may have affected around 30% of adults in the country, costing many of them around NZ$200 a time.

Oracle is fixing 78 security flaws across scores of its product in its latest critical patch update (CPU).

India’s telecoms authorities are blocking widely used file storage websites such as Megaupload, Rapidshare, Mediafire and Putlocker, according to reports on several user forums.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant with Sophos, has reported that a 28-year-old Japanese virus writer has been given a 30 month prison sentence for authoring and disseminating a data-damaging virus.

The alleged author of the Laval botnet has been arrested by police in Canada. It is thought that the 24-year-old programmed the malware himself and then infected servers in Canada, the US and beyond, creating a vast network of zombie PCs.

Police and law enforcement officials have swooped on and arrested more than 20 people in the US, the UK and the Netherlands in connection with the spate of LulzSec and AntiSec hacktivist attacks in recent months.

Federal prosecutors are charging a former Harvard University student with hacking into a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) computer network and stealing 4.8 million academic journal articles.