Large-scale attacks, traffic rerouting traced to Russian hacker hosting network Hackers, perhaps affiliated with a well-known Russian criminal network, have attacked and hijacked Web sites belonging to Georgia, the former Soviet republic now in the fourth day of war with Russia, a security researcher claimed on Sunday.

This version of the story originally appeared in Computerworld's print edition. A multinational ring of hackers that allegedly stole tens of millions of credit and debit card numbers from U.S. retailers used wardriving and sophisticated programming skills to exploit network and system vulnerabilities, according to the federal government.

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The Problem: Companies often block employees from visiting certain sites – ranging from the really nefarious (porn) to probably bad (gambling) to mostly innocuous (Web-based e-mail services). They try to significantly reduce productivity losses, bandwidth consumption, legal risks, and security exposure caused by unauthorized employee access to inappropriate, malicious or distracting Web content.
The Trick: Even if your company won't let employees visit those sites by typing their Web addresses into their browser, they can still sometimes sneak their way onto them. They travel to a third-party site, called a proxy, and type the Web address they want into a search box. Then the proxy site travels to the site they want and displays it for them – so they can see the site without actually visiting it. Proxy.org, for one, features a list of more than 4,000 proxies.
Another way to accomplish the same thing, is to use Google's translation service, asking it to do an English-to-English translation.They can enter this–‘Google.com/translate?langpair=en|en&u=www.blockedsite.com’–replacing "blockedsite.com" with the Web address of the site they want to visit. Google effectively acts as a proxy, calling up the site for them.
The Risk: If they use a proxy to, for example, catch up on e-mail or watch a YouTube video, the main risk is getting caught by their boss. But there are scarier security risks; online bad guys sometimes buy Web addresses that are misspellings of popular sites, then use them to infect visitors' computers. Companies often block those sites, too – but users won't be protected from them if they use a proxy.
How to Stay Safe: Educate your peers to watch their spelling and prevent their habit of using unapproved proxy sites, even for specific sites for productivity-related reasons (like YouTube), by setting up your Endpoint Compliance Auditing solution (like Promisec Spectator Professional or Promisec Innerspace) to automatically reset any user’s proxy properties to match the company’s approved servers.
In the case of Google's translation service you have to use a Web Content Filtering solution (like Websense Enterprise or Secure Computing Sidewinder) that will recognize the unapproved content and block or terminate the browser’s request.

There are a few basic steps to take to prevent data loss; these can be done without requiring additional budget:
1. Make sure people only have access to what they need to have access. Setup the correct folders and permissions.
2. Educate your staff to understand the importance of data security, refresh this every occasionally and send out examples of what can go wrong if this is not done.
3. Prevent users from installing files sharing software and explain the inherent risk, software of this type often leads to user unknowingly uploading files, which they never planned to.
These are all very basic steps but can help in preventing a large amount of the incidents which lead to data loss, some of the biggest cases of data loss in the past year were caused by users breaking one of these simple rules which lead to very large monetary losses. Pfizer lost a large number of employee records when a spouse of one of their employees installed file-sharing applications on her laptop.