SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – A security expert warned that criminals can gain access to locked businesses and apartments across the United States by reproducing the master keys now issued only to firefighters during emergencies.

The expert said he identified a flaw in the heavy metal boxes made by an Arizona-based company called Knox Co, now commonly found outside millions of apartment complexes and commercial properties in cities across the country, including Chicago, Atlanta and San Francisco.

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 27 (Reuters) – Hackers targeted dozens of
computer systems at government agencies across Europe in a
series of attacks that exploited a recently discovered security
flaw in Adobe Systems Inc’s software, security
researchers reported on Wednesday.

Russia’s Kaspersky Lab and Hungary’s Laboratory of
Cryptography and System Security, or CrySyS, said the targets of
the campaign included government computers in the Czech
Republic, Ireland, Portugal and Romania.

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 27 (Reuters) – Hackers targeted dozens of
computer systems at government agencies across Europe in a
series of attacks that exploited a recently discovered security
flaw in Adobe Systems Inc’s software, security
researchers reported on Wednesday.

Russia’s Kaspersky Lab and Hungary’s Laboratory of
Cryptography and System Security, or CrySyS, said the targets of
the campaign included government computers in the Czech
Republic, Ireland, Portugal and Romania.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – A computer security firm said it had freed tens of thousands of infected PCs from a “botnet” that forced enslaved machines to send out spam pharmaceutical ads during a cyber crime-fighting demonstration to top industry executives on Tuesday.

Tillmann Werner, a senior research scientist with a startup known as CrowdStrike, attacked the Kelihos botnet on stage in a rare live demonstration of techniques used to attack cyber crime operations.

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 26 (Reuters) – Researchers at Symantec
Corp have uncovered a version of the Stuxnet computer
virus that was used to attack Iran’s nuclear program in November
2007, two years earlier than previously thought.

Planning for the cyber weapon, the first publicly known
example of a virus being used to attack industrial machinery,
began at least as early as 2005, according to an 18-page report
that the security software company published on Tuesday.

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 25 (Reuters) – A senior adviser to
President Barack Obama said the White House will soon renew
efforts to push cybersecurity legislation through Congress,
though he foresaw an uphill battle given the failure of the last
attempt.

Daniel said the White House has begun drafting “key
legislative principles” for a new bill that it believes can pass
both the House and Senate this time.

By Jim Finkle

(Reuters) – Cybersecurity company Mandiant Corp won plaudits from its peers and made front-page news around the world this week when it published a report that purportedly traced a series of cyberattacks on U.S. companies to a Shanghai-based unit of the Chinese army.

But some hackers have turned the tables on the cyber-expert by creating malicious versions of its 74-page report that were infected with computer viruses. They emailed the tainted reports to their victims this week in a bid to wreak havoc under Mandiant’s name.

BOSTON/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Apple Inc was recently attacked by hackers who infected Macintosh computers of some employees, the company said Tuesday in an unprecedented disclosure describing the widest known cyber attacks targeting Apple computers used by corporations.

Unknown hackers infected the computers of some Apple workers when they visited a website for software developers that had been infected with malicious software. The malware had been designed to attack Mac computers.

BOSTON/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Apple Inc was recently attacked by hackers who infected the Macintosh computers of some employees, the company said on Tuesday in an unprecedented disclosure that described the widest known cyber attacks against Apple-made computers to date.

Unknown hackers infected the computers of some Apple workers when they visited a website for software developers that had been infected with malicious software. The malware had been designed to attack Mac computers, the company said in a statement provided to Reuters.