Art.com hacked

The website operator Art.com, which sells art and posters, has been broken into by a hacker, the company has announced.

Credit card numbers and names of clients that used the company's sites between July and September this year were stolen. The company runs the websites Art.com and Allposters.com. Michael Heinstein, chief executive officer of Art.com, said: "We value our customers tremendously and understand how important security is to them.

"This is why we have acted to notify affected customers and credit card companies as quickly as possible after vigorously investigating this event." Art.com then swiftly took more action to make sure its sites were secured against "future attacks of this type", added Mr Heinstein. So far none of the credit card numbers that were stolen have been used in illegal transactions or for identity theft, Art.com stated.

Recently the website Bobbear, which combats money laundering was attacked by cyber criminals, according to the security software company Sophos. For more information on digital products and services visit www.dsldance.com

Companies 'not ready for disasters'

Many companies are not ready should the worst happen, the security software company Symantec has reported.

Though 91 percent of IT companies do carry out tests of their disaster-recovery abilities, more than half of those tests fail, a recent in-depth study found. Many IT professionals fear that a disaster could hurt their company's reputation, affect the loyalty of customers and result in company information being compromised, the research discovered.

Sean Derrington, director, storage management product marketing at Symantec, said: "IT executives are taking a fresh, hard look at their disaster recovery and business continuity strategies. "To protect against downtime, organizations must implement high availability and disaster recovery across their enterprise environments."

Companies also need to have procedures in place that allow for them to test their recovery abilities, Mr Derrington added. Meanwhile, Microsoft has found that phishing scams are successful approximately 0.4 percent of the time. For more information visit www.broadbandnational.com