UPDATED 07:27 EDT / OCTOBER 05 2013

Weekly Security Review: Adobe Hacked, Silk Road Sacked

It’s been an eventful week in the cybersecurity space, especially for Adobe and its customers. In one of the largest and most sophisticated cyber attacks in recent memory, hackers compromised the software maker’s corporate network and got away with the personal information of as many as 2.9 million customers. Adobe chief security officer Brad Arkin disclosed in a blog post that the stolen data includes names, encrypted credit and debit card numbers and expiration dates.

Besides user information, the hackers also obtained the source code for three of the company’s products: Acrobat, ColdFusion, and ColdFusion Builder. SiliconANGLE cybersecurity editor John Casaretto pointed out that the code could be used to target the tens of millions of users who use the company’s software to view PDF files and develop web applications.

The Adobe breach crossed the wire after Cloudera announced that it’s adding support for Accumulo to help enterprises secure their growing troves of data. Originally developed by the NSA and commercialized by Sqrrl, Accumulo is an open key-value store that enables users to control data visibility and access at the cell level.

The integration with Accumulo builds on Cloudera’s homegrown Sentry, a free role-based access control tool that is billed as the “industry’s first fine-grained authorization solution.”

Earlier this week, Symantec revealed that it has dealt a crippling blow to the cyber criminal gang behind ZeroAccess, one of the largest known botnets in existence. The security firm disconnected approximately one quarter of the 1.9 million slave computers that ZeroAccess used to carry out large scale click fraud and Bitcoin mining.

Symantec’s latest victory against hacking comes in the aftermath of the FBI’s crackdown on Silk Road, a deepnet site dubbed as the Amazon of the underworld. Authorities seized approximately $3.6 million worth of Bitcoins and arrested founder Ross William Ulbricht “without incident” in San Francisco.


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