Botnet whack-a-mole just might work
The security industry upped the ante against criminal bot operators this week. On Wednesday, security firm Kaspersky reported it had disrupted a botnet consisting of 110,000 computers infected with...
View ArticleThe new cyber defense: Hack the attackers
As the ecology of online attacks has evolved, so have defenders' methods. In 2009, the then-classified Comprehensive National Cyber Initiative -- the U.S. government's cyber security strategy --...
View ArticleShades of pcAnywhere in VMware breach
This week, virtualization software maker VMware acknowledged that a single file posted online came from the source code to its ESX hypervisor. Dating back to at least 2004, the source code may have...
View ArticleScrambls puts control of social media back in the hands of users
Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites may not be happy if a new service that launched in beta Wednesday takes off.The service, scrambls, may be misspelled and lack a proper capital letter,...
View ArticleFlashback malware turns Macs into moola, says Symantec
Malware may be a minor issue for Mac users, but Mac users are a major windfall for cyber criminals, if a Symantec analysis of the Flashback Trojan bears out.The security company reverse-engineered a...
View ArticleCould the .secure domain make the Internet safer?
Most calls for new TLD (top-level domain) names seem like little more than real estate developers proposing the creation of entire new continents just to lease the land. The creation of .name, .pro,...
View ArticleFlamer starts a flame war over origin
Calling it "what might be the most sophisticated cyber weapon yet unleashed," security firm Kaspersky announced on Monday it had begun analyzing a large and complex program that had plagued Iranian...
View ArticleApple's operating systems: Fortresses or prisons?
Many of the same capabilities that make Apple's iOS and Mac OS X operating systems secure are those that close the platform in some way.Security experts who argue that Apple's iOS is the most secure...
View ArticleWhat IT can do now that user passwords aren't safe
The parade of revelations of passwords stolen from online services -- LinkedIn (where poor implementation meant nearly two-thirds could be descrypted), eHarmony, and Last.fm most recently -- has many...
View ArticleFlame stashes secrets in USB drives
Since the primordial days of data tapes and floppy disks, viruses have used removable storage to spread between computers or, more correctly, have used computers to spread between storage media.The...
View ArticleGrum botnet takedown puts spam on the run
One down, two more to go? On Wednesday a Russian Internet service provider took down the last master server that controlled compromised computers as part of the Grum botnet, the world's third-largest...
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Hackers in the limelight: Scenes from Black Hat 2012
Breaking in: Security experts do their best Government and corporate security professionals descend on Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas this week for the annual exchange of information on the latest...
View ArticleSecurity pros advise users to ditch Java
Security firms are being none too gentle with Oracle's Java following the revelation this week that attackers are using two unpatched Java vulnerabilities to compromise selected targets. The most...
View ArticleHuge iTunes patch: Apply it and move on
While Apple's update to iTunes played second fiddle to the impending release of the iPhone 5, the security community did not miss the massive patch published by the consumer-technology giant on the...
View ArticleThe 'bootkit' menace is a paper threat
Is Windows 8's security compromised from the start? Two recent papers laying out the groundwork for next-generation rootkits seem to argue the point, but a significant caveat makes all the...
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