Computer network at the Lasell College in US has been hacked, leading to unauthorized access of data containing personal details like the Social Security numbers of existing and earlier students, faculty members, staff, and the colleges' alumni, as reported by The Boston Globe on March 19, 2008.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission, on March 20, 2008, terminated share trading in three small-sized business firms for ten days because it thought that the companies were involved in pump-and-dump spam.

A number of serious security flaws were found in the Kerberos authentication system at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology following which the system's developers adequately patched them.

According to experts, security holes in the server of MIT Kerberos Key Distribution Center could be remotely exploited to take control of the main database, get hold on sensitive information, and cause a DOS condition.

A Seattle man has been punished in the federal court for around more than 4 years in prison and 3 years of supervised release for e-mail fraud using a protected system without permission to further identity theft and fraud, on March 17, 2008.

The US State Department said on March 21, 2008 that during its ongoing investigation of several incidents, it found that the digital passport documents of three major presidential candidates improperly fell into the hands of employees, as reported by The New York Times on March 21, 2008.

An important issue that follows from the incident is that there should be greater controls on data access for contractors and employees in the government and the IT sector.

Domain registrar NetNames recently launched its Quarterly Fraud Report on March 20, 2008 that highlights increment in online frauds against banking customers through phishing e-mails in the beginning of 2008.

Envisional, the sister concern of NetNames, created the report for finding the number of phishing e-mails received by major financial institutions' customers from early December 2007 to end of February 2008. According to the report, financial service organizations' customers received more than 60,000 phishing e-mails, a significant number, in February 2008.

On March 19, 2008, Microsoft had to release a new patch for an Excel
flaw, after acknowledging that it had caused calculation faults in
programs applying Microsoft Office's Visual Basic for Applications
(VBA), according to the Microsoft officials.

Microsoft admitted that the flaw could permit a hacker to remotely run
a program on the victim computer. The vulnerability exists in the
method in which Excel files are executed and could permit a hacker to
remotely control a customer's computer along with the capacity to run
malware.

The faculty and student at Springfield's University of Illinois (UIS) have been recently receiving huge spam mails every day. More recently they received a series of messages advertising sexual medicines.

According to university officials, a batch of 30-40 e-mail users who reported to UIS about the increasing spam, said that they recently received additional 2-10 spam mails on a daily basis.

It has been observed that the spam messages increasingly managed to pass through the filters. This boost of messages does not relate to the overall increase in the number of normal e-mails but fluctuations or spikes have been found that is likely spam.

Bank customers in Ireland are being targeted with as many as 300 phishing attacks per day in which fraudsters try to lure people into divulging their security codes to commit theft from those people's online bank accounts. Ireland's AIB (Allied Irish Bank) has warned its customers that a sharp increase in phishing scams was noticed and therefore, they needed to be more vigilant.

A supermarket chain in Maine reported on March 17, 2008 that a security breach into its system network put at risk debit and credit card accounts of about 4.2 Million customers, as reported by Cnet on March 17, 2008.

According to the company, the theft of data happened from the computer systems of Hannaford when the process of card authorization was being transmitted. According to reports, Hannaford was informed about the unnatural transactions being done on cards at the stores on February 27, 2008. This led to law enforcement and IT investigations to take necessary measures.