The week in security: Kmart, DJs hacked as report confirms Target ignored security basics

News of the hacking of two high-profile Australian retail brands came down within 24 hours of each other, as Kmart Australia and then David Jones joined the ranks of the digitally infiltrated.

Kmart's online ordering system was breached, with the company confirming customer details had been compromised and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) commending the company's proactivity in notifying the authority of its breach.

As David Jones revealed it, too had been hacked, questions were being raised as to whether the culprit was an unpatched implementation of the IBM WebSphere e-commerce platform.

Meanwhile – and in the wake of a study finding that many security executives still often blame security breaches on user behaviour and a lack of an executive support – an audit of US retailer Target's security systems found that it (and, by extension, its security executives) had fundamentally failed to take even some basic security measures.

Expired digital certificates can cost businesses $US15m ($A21m) per outage, according to one calculation. Similarly, privileged accounts have persisted as another key vector for attacks – despite considerable effort expended to protect against other types of attack.

Among other things, building a better security presence requires more skilled people – but finding those with the right business and IT skill set means knowing which questions to ask in an interview.

Apple overhauled its privacy policy, while Yahoo's latest transparency report suggested the company was minimising the number of requests for user information that it granted to Australian authorities.

One security researcher found a way to potentially bypass Mac OS X's Gatekeeper feature, even as malware authors were finding new ways to trick users into disabling their antivirus software to enable a malware infiltration.

Some users were worried about what turned out to be a bogus Windows 7 update caused by a Microsoft stuff-up. Others were curious after news spread of malware that infects routers, cleans out existing malware, and locks down the devices against future attacks.

Finally, the US embassy was urging Europe's top court not to declare the US-EU 'Safe Harbour' data-sharing agreemen

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