Reuters reports that according to Nigerian security sources, gunmen in five speedboats on Sunday (1/4) hijacked a vessel belonging to French oil services group Bourbon as it made its way towards a Royal Dutch Shell offshore oilfield.

We had a post on Thursday about the New Year's Eve bomb scare that forced the evacuation of downtown Aspen, Colorado. A 72-year-old disgruntled former resident left four gift-wrapped bombs that were all neutralized by bomb squads, and no one was hurt. However, what was hurt was the local economy. The AP is taking a look (link below) at how people working in the hospitality and tourism industries were adversely affected by the resort town being effectively closed down on one of the most important revenue generating nights of the year.

On December 31, DELL announced the departure of two top executives, global operations chief Mike Cannon and marketing chief Mark Jarvis, as well as the reorganization of the company's commercial sales division. Here BusinessWeek asks the question of whether or not the struggling company will be saved by this "bold shakeup".

In this article, the organizers of the Intersec Trade Fair and Conference scheduled to take place at the Dubai International Convention Center this month discuss the growth of the global biometrics market and some of the new technologies they think will help triple market revenue by 2012. Intersec will feature over thirty companies showcasing their products related to biometrics. The event is January 18 - 20.

Data security should be of concern to every industry and profession, and this article (link below) points out the need for greater vigilance in the law profession where data loss or theft could put you at risk for malpractice, or perhaps put an end to your practice. There is specific attention paid to smaller firms, which may not have an IT staff. The article goes on to provide a list of resources and websites that smaller firms may want to reference in the battle against cyber threats.

On November 13, 2008 the largest ever earthquake preparedness drill in the U.S. was conducted in Southern California. It was appropriately dubbed, "The Great Southern California ShakeOut Drill". The exercise involved modeling the effects of a magnitude 7.8 earthquake. The LA Times is reporting that the results of this simulation indicate that about five high-rise steel buildings in the region would collapse during a real quake, and other structures are at risk.

Karsten Nohl, the security investigator who was instrumental in cracking NXP's Mifare Classic chips delivered a presentation at the 25th Chaos Communication Congress (25C3) in Berlin earlier this week. According to a Heise Security article, Nohl's general take on most RFID encryption is that "chip manufacturers have so far criminally neglected the standard of encryption used by these chips and the standard of the reading systems..."

It did not take long for VeriSign to react to the discovery of an exploitable flaw in a key algorithm used to generate Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates. Within a day of the team demonstrating its work at the 2008 Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) in Berlin, VeriSign announced it is bumping up the timeframe to get rid of the offending MD5 digital certificate to a month earlier than planned.

From VeriSign press release: "VeriSign has been phasing out the MD5 hashing algorithm for years. Until the MD5 exploit was made public, VeriSign had planned to discontinue the use of MD5 in customers' certificates by the end of January 2009. VeriSign has since discontinued using MD5 when issuing RapidSSL Certificates and has confirmed that all other SSL Certificates that VeriSign issues are not vulnerable to this MD5 attack. VeriSign will continue on its path to discontinue MD5 in all end entity certificates by the end of January, 2009."