Sequoia Voting Systems plans to publicly release the source code for its new optical scan voting system, the company announced Tuesday–a remarkable reversal for a voting machine maker long criticized for resisting public examination of its proprietary systems.

The company’s new public source optical-scan voting system, called Frontier Election System, will be submitted for federal certification and testing in the first quarter of next year. The code will be released for public review in November, the company said, on its web site. Sequoia’s proprietary, closed systems are currently used in 16 states and the District of Columbia.

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Wal-Mart (WMT) was the victim of a serious security breach in 2005 and 2006 in which hackers targeted the development team in charge of the chain’s point-of-sale system and siphoned source code and other sensitive data to a computer in Eastern Europe, Wired.com has learned.

Internal documents reveal for the first time that the nation’s largest retailer was among the earliest targets of a wave of cyberattacks that went after the bank-card processing systems of brick-and-mortar stores around the United States beginning in 2005. The details of the breach, and the company’s challenges in reconstructing what happened, shed new light on the vulnerable state of retail security at the time, despite card-processing security standards that had been in place since 2001.

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Security researchers have spent a lot of time the last couple of years cracking building access systems from the level of the user device–RFID and smartcards, for example.

But a researcher in Texas found that he could crack one electronic access system at the network control level and simply open a door with a spoofed command sent over the network, eliminating the need for an access card.

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The fireworks weren’t only in the sky this past Fourth of July but were seemingly in the Intertubes, too, when U.S. and South Korean government websites were struck by a series of cyber sorties that knocked a few sites off line and left some people seeing red–as in the crimson Communist hue.

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Talk of cyberwar is in the air after more than two dozen high-level websites in the United States and South Korea were hit by denial-of-service attacks this week. But cooler heads are pointing to a pilfered five-year-old worm as the source of the traffic, under control of an unsophisticated hacker who apparently did little to bolster his borrowed code against detection.

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A computer programmer working for Goldman Sachs was arrested last week on charges that he stole proprietary source code for software his employer uses to make sophisticated, high-speed, high-volume stock and commodities trades.

Sergey Aleynikov, who earned nearly $400,000 in his job, allegedly stole 32 megabytes of data over four days in June and transferred it to a website hosted in Germany before trying to erase his tracks from Goldman Sachs’ network.

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In a sparsely decorated office suite two floors above a neighborhood of strip malls and car dealerships, former oncologist Douglas Jackson is struggling to resuscitate a dying dream.

Jackson, 51, is the maverick founder of E-Gold, the first-of-its-kind digital currency that was once used by millions of people in more than a hundred countries. Today the currency is barely alive.

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Forget the new cyber security czar position that President Barack Obama announced last week.

The real sign that the White House might be finally taking cyber security seriously came in an announcement on Friday that Jeff Moss, aka “Dark Tangent” and the former hacker behind the annual DefCon hacker confab in Las Vegas, has been appointed to the Department of Homeland Security’s Advisory Council (HSAC).

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Despite the fact that many Americans distrust the National Security Agency for its role in the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, the agency should be entrusted with securing the nation’s telecommunications networks and other cyber infrastructures, President Obama’s director of national intelligence told Congress on Wednesday.

Director of National Intelligence Admiral Dennis Blair told the House intelligence committee that the NSA, rather than the Department of Homeland Security which currently oversees cybersecurity, has the smarts and the skills to secure cyberspace.

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An 18-year-old hacker with a history of celebrity pranks has admitted to Monday’s hijacking of multiple high-profile Twitter accounts, including President-Elect Barack Obama’s, and the official feed for Fox News.

The hacker, who goes by the handle GMZ, told Threat Level on Tuesday he gained entry to Twitter’s administrative control panel by pointing an automated password-guesser at a popular user’s account. The user turned out to be a member of Twitter’s support staff, who’d chosen the weak password “happiness.”

Cracking the site was easy, because Twitter allowed an unlimited number of rapid-fire log-in attempts.

“I feel it’s another case of administrators not putting forth effort toward one of the most obvious and overused security flaws,” he wrote in an IM interview. “I’m sure they find it difficult to admit it.”

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Newsweek is reporting that computer networks of both the Obama and McCain campaigns were the targets of a sophisticated cyberattack in the run-up to the general election and, in the Obama case, “a serious amount of files” were downloaded from the system.

The Obama camp initially thought in midsummer that their system was infected by password-stealing malware uploaded to someone’s computer through a phishing attack. But after FBI and Secret Service agents investigated, they told staff they had a problem “way bigger than what you understand.”

The intrusion even led White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten to tell the Obama camp, “You have a real problem … and you have to deal with it.”

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A member of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s board seized a report by three MIT students about flaws with the Boston subway’s fare collection system and delivered a scathing indictment of the subway system and its general manager, calling the system “a mess” and saying she had “lost all confidence” in the system’s general manager, Daniel A. Grabauskas.

The students, who were set to deliver a presentation last Sunday at the DefCon hacker conference about security vulnerabilities in the MBTA’s CharlieTicket and CharlieCard payment cards, were barred from speaking about the vulnerabilities at a hacker conference after the MBTA obtained a temporary restraining order last Saturday, gagging them for 10 days.

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