Malware

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority, or SF MTA, was hacked on Friday. "You Hacked, All Data Encrypted," was the message reportedly displayed on computer screens at the authority's stations throughout the city. "Contact for Key ([email protected])ID:681 , Enter." Fare payment mach...

Sites that repeatedly violate Google's safe browsing policies will be classified as repeat offenders, the company said. A small number of websites take corrective actions after Google displays alerts on their landing pages warning visitors that they're harmful. However, they typically revert to viol...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Defeating Malware With Its Own DNA

It's widely known that human DNA evidence has had a major impact in the criminal justice system. Now another kind of DNA may have a similar impact in the fight to eradicate malicious software. Malware DNA, also known as "malware provenance," is the art and science of attributing elements of one obj...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Bot Armies Boost Candidates’ Popularity on Twitter

Internet bots have many useful online purposes, but they have a dark side, too, as three researchers demonstrated in their analysis of Twitter traffic during the first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Bots are used to automate functions on the Net. For example, if you be...

The source code for Mirai, the malware behind the botnet that launched a massive attack on the Krebs on Security website -- the largest DDoS attack on record -- has been released in the wild, according to Brian Krebs, author of the blog. A hacker who goes by the handle "Anna-senpai," apparently beca...

Federal authorities have been investigating reports that hackers targeted the mobile phones of a handful of Democratic Party staffers. The news follows a series of breaches in recent months that revealed emails and other personal information of party staffers and other Democratic officials. The FBI...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Hacking Elections Is Easy, Study Finds

It's no longer a question whether hackers will influence the 2016 elections in the United States -- only how much they'll be able to sway them. Leaked emails already have cost a Democratic Party chairperson her job, and the FBI last month issued a flash warning that foreign cyberadversaries had brea...

Cisco has swung into action to combat a hacker group's exploitation of vulnerabilities in its firmware. The group, known as the "Shadow Brokers," released online malware and other exploits it claimed to have stolen from the Equation Group, which is believed to have ties to the United States National...

The website of prominent security blogger Brian Krebs is back online this week after sustaining one of the largest distributed denial of service attacks in Internet history. DDoS attacks typically disrupt service at a website by flooding it with junk traffic. In this case, garbage traffic assaulted ...

Apple on Thursday issued a patch that addresses three recently discovered critical iOS zero-day vulnerabilities, and advised users to update their systems immediately. State-sponsored actors exploited the flaws to target United Arab Emirates human rights defender Ahmed Mansoor, and a Mexican journal...

Symantec and Kaspersky Lab last week separately announced the discovery of a highly sophisticated advanced persistent threat that had eluded security researchers for at least five years. A previously unknown group called "Strider" has been using Remsec, an advanced tool that seems to be designed pri...

Russia's Federal Security Service, or FSB, recently reported that it found a cyberspying virus in the computer networks of more than 20 state authorities and defense contractors. The claim that malware has infected various government and defense companies, published last month by Russia's official T...

Four newly identified vulnerabilities could affect 900 million Android devices, Check Point researchers disclosed. The vulnerabilities, which the researchers dubbed "QuadRooter," affect Android devices that use Qualcomm chipsets. They exist in the chipset software drivers. The drivers, which control...

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