Malware

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Bad Ads Outstrip Porn as Mobile Phone Infection Vectors

Trawling porn sites used to be the best way to pick up an electronically transmitted disease on your smartphone. That's changed. Every one in five times a mobile user is redirected to a malware site online, it's done through a malicious ad, according to a new report. That's three times what it was t...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Security Firms Scour Mobile Apps

Security pros weren't very kind to mobile applications last week. Several firms knocked apps produced for the smartphone market for all kinds of risky behaviors that could lead to trouble not only for mobile device owners, but also for their employers. Android has been a poster child for misbehavi...

Kaspersky Lab has released research findings on Careto, a malware toolkit that has hit more than 380 victims in 31 countries so far since 2007. "Careto" means "mask" in Spanish, Kaspersky notes. The word also could point to an ancient tradition incorporated into Portuguese and Brazilian Carnival fes...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Target Fiasco Shines Light on Supply Chain Attacks

The holiday data breach at Target was opened up with stolen credentials from a vendor in the company's supply chain, according to reports that surfaced last week. That kind of attack is getting more and more common these days. "About 80 percent of data breaches originate in the supply chain," said T...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Bitcoin’s Popularity Attracts Malware Writers

While most folks know the value of money, few know the latest value of a Bitcoin, a virtual currency prone to wide price swings. Those swings haven't deterred those on the digital leading edge from speculating in the currency -- or bad app writers from cooking up ways to steal it. "Bitcoins -- and i...

Last week, China's military took its new "ultra-high speed missile vehicle" -- or "hypersonic glide vehicle," if you prefer -- for its first test drive, raising eyebrows among U.S. defense officials. The hypersonic aircraft, capable of maneuvering at a mindboggling 10 times the speed of sound -- tha...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

PowerLocker Takes Ransomware to a New Level

Up to now, the malware program CryptoLocker has been king of the ransomware roost, but PowerLocker may present a new challenge. "It has some interesting countermeasures to thwart researchers," said Harry Sverdlove, CTO of Bit9. Among those countermeasures are the ability to determine if it's running...

Certain advertisements on Yahoo's European website may have helped infect thousands of computers with malware, according to Yahoo. A Dutch computer security firm, Fox-IT, outed Yahoo last Friday, penning a blog post claiming that attackers had used ads.yahoo.com to insert malicious ads. Fox-IT was a...

Alan Turing, a British man whose code-breaking prowess helped thwart Nazi Germany in World War II, was pardoned this week by Queen Elizabeth for his decades-old "crime." Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for "gross indecency" for having a sexual relationship with another man, a ruling that resulted in t...

Scientists in China will use the country's Tianhe-1A supercomputer to forecast and analyze smog in major cities. The Tianhe-1A will be used to create a simulation that will collate data from across more than 100 Chinese cities. Theoretically, this will enable scientists to predict the density of smo...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Malware Drop, Ransomware Rise Forecast for 2014

A malware decline and ransomware rise are in the security crystal ball for 2014. There will be less malware spreading through networks next year as hackers focus on obtaining credentials that allow them to access systems under the guise of authentic users. "Malware will still be important in estab...

Microsoft said last week that it had disrupted the ZeroAccess botnet, which has been around since 2011. It joined forces with the FBI, the European Cybercrime Center, and several high-tech companies. Microsoft also filed suit against various John Does believed to be involved with the botnet. However...

TECH TREK

Chinese Banks Warned About Bitcoins

China's central bank said Thursday that the nation's banks and payment systems were prohibited from handling Bitcoins. Bitcoins are "virtual goods" and have no legal weight, the banking body said. Individuals can still toy with them at their own risk, but financial institutions and payment systems c...

Cybercriminals recently stole more than 2 million usernames and passwords from several popular sites including Facebook and Google. Pony, a botnet that logs user keystrokes, captured the information from more than 90,000 websites during the past month and then sent it to a hacker-controlled server.

British intelligence agency GCHQ reportedly has spoofed LinkedIn profiles of employees at mobile communications companies and mobile billing firms to gain access to their corporate networks. The first known attack was on Belgacom, a telecom firm partly owned by the Belgian government, according to a...

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