Malware

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

FBI, Carnegie Mellon Deny $1M Contract to Crack Tor

The FBI has denied allegations that it paid Carnegie Mellon University security researchers $1 million to crack a network designed to protect the anonymity of its users. The Tor Project, which operates the network, last week accused the FBI of cutting the CMU deal. The attack occurred from January t...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Deep Learning App Targets Malware

Here's the problem with most programs aimed at killing malicious software: They need someone to tell them something's malicious. What if, however, the programs had the smarts to identify bad code on their own? That's what a company called Deep Instinct says its security solution, launched last week,...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Mobile Malware’s Growth Slows, Nastiness Grows

The good news about mobile malware in 2015 is that growth has slowed down. The bad news is that the malware entering the market is more virulent than ever. While there hasn't been a sharp rise in the volume of mobile malware this year, the increasingly malicious nature of the types of malware and at...

Hackers hypothetically could turn Fitbit health bands into PC-infecting malware carriers, Fortinet security researcher Axelle Apvrille demonstrated Wednesday at the Hack.lu conference in Luxembourg. Apvrille showed how it was possible to access a Fitbit's Bluetooth connection and, in a mere 10 secon...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

DDoS Attacks Create Smokescreens for Larceny

Distributed denial of service attacks have evolved from protest tool to criminal weapon. More than one in three DDoS attacks are used to plant malware or a virus on company systems, and 40 percent of them result in data theft, according to NeuStar's semiannual DDoS attack and protection report rel...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Black Hats Offer Million-Dollar iOS 9 Bug Bounty

Zerodium has posted a million-dollar bounty for juicy iOS 9 bugs or jailbreaks. Zerodium runs a market where exploits and vulnerabilities are bought and sold, according to Damballa. "While there is no insight into a specific buyer, we can assume if an exploit for iOS 9 is found, Zerodium will sell...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

What Goes Around Comes Around: Russia Gets Hacked

Russia has been a prime suspect in recent cyberattacks launched against U.S. government targets. However, Russia has been poked with the other end of the hacker stick. For more than two months, hacker attacks originating in China have bedeviled Russia's military and telecom sectors, researchers at P...

Developers who unknowingly used a malicious tool to code their programs uploaded hundreds of malware-infected apps to the iTunes App Store, China-based iOS developers reportedly discovered last week. Security researchers around the world have analyzed it. Called "XcodeGhost," the malware is hidden i...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

An Insider Betrayed Ashley Madison – Go Figure

When the giant data breach at infidelity website Ashley Madison made headlines last month, the CEO of the site's owner was quick to claim the caper was an inside job. He had the attacker's profile and work credentials, Avid Life Media's CEO Noel Biderman told ace cybersecurity blogger Brian Krebs. T...

Data-robbing malicious software dubbed "KeyRaider" has stolen more than 225,000 valid Apple accounts and thousands of certificates, private keys and purchasing receipts, Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 reported last week. The firm identified the malware in cooperation with WeipTech, which found the acco...

Qualcomm on Monday announced Snapdragon Smart Protect, a hardware-software product that could make the world a safer place for Android smartphone users. Snapdragon Smart Protect, which will become available with Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon 820 processor, will provide real-time, on-device machine ...

Mac users, beware -- the ads you see on the Web could let hackers hijack your device. Malwarebytes has discovered a new zero-day exploit in OS X that lets apps bypass passwords during installation to get root permission through a Unix shell. A new adware installer downloaded by a Malwarebytes rese...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Swipes, Taps and Cursor Movements Can Foil Cyberthieves

Swipes, taps, cursor movements and other ways of interacting with electronic devices can be used to protect online merchants from Net fraudsters. Many people are familiar with biometric authenticators like irises, fingerprints and voices, but it turns out that how we behave with our machines can be ...

A highly sophisticated group of hackers who use cutting-edge techniques to shield their attacks from detection has been bedeviling corporations around the world for several years. The group, which Symantec dubbed "Morpho" and Kaspersky Lab calls "Wild Neutron," has hit multibillion-dollar corporatio...

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