Cyber-attacks are becoming more recurrent now, and large organizations are suffering sleepless nights to remediate it. The latest to hit, a former Cisco engineer is accused of computer hacking charges by a federal grand jury. Peter Alfred-Adekeye, an ex-Cisco employee, is facing five counts of illegitimately accessing Cisco’s network even after he left the company in 2005.  The case is now with U.S. District Court in San Jose.

Alfred-Adekeye instituted a company called Multiven, an independent provider of service and support for Cisco equipment, after he left Cisco. The company later sued Cisco claiming that Cisco is monopolizing the network equipment business by forcing owners to buy its SMARTnet service contracts.  In return Cisco would provide regular updates and bug fixes. Cisco countersued Multiven accusing that Alfred-Adekeye hacked into Cisco’s networks and stole copyrighted software.

Multiven founder Alfred-Adekeye was then arrested in May 2010 in Vancouver, Canada, on 97 counts of accessing Cisco’s computer system without authorization.  Cisco later settled the case with Multiven but Alfred-Adekeye now facing these five hacking charges.

In one of the worst online attacks in history with 72 networks being infiltrated, including the United Nations, 14 governments and major defense contractors, when Operation Cyber Rat was revealed yesterday.  McAfee, who discovered the attacks, claim the attacker looks like China. The countries that were affected are Japan, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Indonesia, Denmark, Singapore, Hong Kong, Germany, and India and the United States.

Earlier this month in North Korea, hackers believed to be graduates from elite North Korean universities hacked an online gaming website to steal personal information.  The hackers are hired by a South Korean crime ring to work in China. South Korean social networking site Nate and Cyworld were attacked by Chinese hackers last month.

China is being pin-pointed as the center stage of many other cyber-attacks but with little evidence. China has published a statement in their national newspaper regarding the allegations and has shown great repentance over the accusations.

In another Cisco development, Cisco warned customers that a supplied kit with CD-ROM when used would took users automatically to a known malware repository site. The affected CDs were supplied between December 2010 and August 2011. When the disc was opened, it automatically used to redirect users to a malware repository site.

Cisco on the clarification said, “To the best of our knowledge, starting from December 2010 until the time of this document’s publication on August 3, 2011, customers were never in a position to have their computer compromised by using the CDs provided by Cisco.”

Cisco further added, “Additionally, the third-party site in question is currently inactive as a malware repository, so customers are not in immediate danger of having their computers compromised. However, if this third-party website would become active as a malware repository again, there is a potential that users could infect their operating system by opening the CD with their web browser.”

Cisco is now offering clean ISO images to download to customers to burn a safe copy of their warranty information.