Last week, Tripwire explored the story of Austin Alcala , a teenager who penetrated a number of American videogame corporations and the United States military as a member of an international hacking group. We now report on the story of Konstantin Simeonov Kavrakov, a Bulgarian hacker who is responsible for having infiltrated Bill Gates’ bank account and stolen thousands of dollars. Kavrakov, who...

"The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.” – Albert Einstein Being involved in information security is intimidating. Not just because you are dealing with complex technology with serious implications if you fail, but everyone around you is going to be smarter than you. Even your adversaries. Especially your adversaries. Get used to it. By everyone being smarter, I don’t mean to...

The Hard Rock Casino in Las Vegas has been hit with malware leading to the compromise of credit card data, names and addresses at restaurant, bar and retail locations. The compromise did not affect the hotel or casino transactions. At this time, no details regarding the specific malware or other specifics regarding the compromise were provided. However, the glaring point of this particular breach...

A security firm has identified a new malware campaign on Careerbuilder.com , a popular job search website, in which attackers are using phishing and social engineering techniques in order to trick users into opening malicious documents. In a post published on its security blog, Proofpoint explains that attackers are posting malicious documents in the Microsoft Word format to open positions on...

You know what I don’t want to talk about any more? Responsible disclosure. The problem is that, as old as that discussion is for information security, it and the adjacent topics, remain relevant for many other industries. There’s a good chance you caught the media coverage of a recent incident involving Chris Roberts, a security researcher, being removed from a flight for a joking tweet about...

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is assisting Rutgers University investigate the source of a second targeted attack that has crippled the university’s Internet in the past month. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation is assisting the university with its search,” agency spokeswoman Celeste Danzi explained on Wednesday. Danzi has declined to provide additional comment about the FBI’s...

Thirty thousand people; five hundred vendors; a clan of security practitioners seeking out safety in their ecosystem; a tribe of knowledge pursuing the opportunity to share best practice and thought leadership to increase likelihood of survival... my first RSA. Amit Yoran’s Keynote suggests that an evolution out of the Dark Ages of Security is required for our next evolution, as we've become...

Today, security engineers at Google announced the release of a new browser extension aimed to help users better protect their Google accounts against phishing attacks. Known as Password Alert, the free, open-source Chrome extension works by alerting users when they enter their passwords into any non-Google site. “Once you’ve installed and initialized Password Alert, Chrome will remember a...

In ages past, invading armies would poison the water source – usually a well – of a city in order to reduce the fighting capability of the enemy or to force the populace of a city under siege to surrender. This method was usually successful because an invader could have a devastating effect on a very large population with minimal yet targeted effort. But only if the poison wasn't discovered in a...

Plenty of people these days are prepared to augment their bodies with face furniture, piercings, rings and tattoos. But would you implant a chip in your hand to show how easy it is to exploit an Android phone? That's what former US navy petty officer Seth Wahle did, in an attempt to demonstrate how business networks could be compromised. Wahle took an NFC chip, similar to the kind found in many of...

Continuous monitoring is poised to do for information security what cloud deployment did for global productivity. Continuous monitoring not only has a role to play in preventing large-scale data breaches but it can also help compliance-sensitive organizations save money by facilitating long-term compliance continuity and reducing annual audit overhead. On the drawing board, continuous monitoring...

Earlier this month, Lastline , a security firm that focuses on real-time analysis of advanced malware, issued a new report on the evolving landscape of evasive malware. Co-founder and chief scientist at Lastline Christopher Kruegel published the report as part of his presentation for RSA Conference 2015 entitled, “ Evasive Malware Exposed and Deconstructed .” His findings serve as an update for “...

General Keith Alexander, the former head of the National Security Agency (NSA), is concerned that the United States’ energy infrastructure is vulnerable to targeted attacks launched by sophisticated actors. “The greatest risk is a catastrophic attack on the energy infrastructure. We are not prepared for that,” he said. According to General Alexander, the West’s “doomsday” scenario involves a...

This might be hard to believe, but it is true: 59 percent of data breaches are happening not because of some smart hacker who wants to do harm to your company but because of your own employees. In order to stop these incidents, you have to focus on two things (other than investing in new technology): set your internal processes and procedures correctly, and train your employees and make them aware...

Last time, we explored the story of Timothy Lance Lai , at one time a private tutor who was arrested for providing his former students with a keylogger, which they in turn used to change their grades. We now report on the story of Austin Alcala, a teenage hacker who infiltrated various American corporations and the United States military as a member of an international hacking group. At just age...

After an action-packed week at RSA, we’re happy to say this year’s show didn’t disappoint, as it encouraged the information security community to “challenge today’s security thinking.” We saw consistent themes across many presentation topics, as well as vendors’ messaging, including one of the biggest issues seen in the recently released Verizon DBIR : people are the problem . Below are a few...

On Saturday, the website and Twitter account of electric vehicle maker Tesla was compromised briefly, as well as CEO Elon Musk's Twitter account. The website was defaced after the DNS for TeslaMotors.com was redirected to another server hosting an image with various messages and faces of a few people. The DNS may have been compromised through a phishing attack, as is usually the case; however...

It could be said that the proliferation of automation is the defining characteristic of the last 100 years. In almost every area of our lives, we’ve found a way to leverage technology to increase our efficiency, freeing us up for higher-order tasks… The things we like to do, the things that are hard, the things we’re good at. A great example of this is the evolution of personal travel. What used...

Earlier this month, an explosion at a power station in Maryland caused outages at the White House, the Capital, and the State Department. The service interruption, which affected between 10,000 and 30,000 people, was caused by a 230-kilovolt transmission conductor that broke free from its support structure, according to NBC News . As a result, the Smithsonian and other popular tourist sites in the...

According to a tech consultant, Facebook collects all writing that is entered into a text box and sends it to its servers regardless of whether a user chooses to publish it. In a post published on his blog , Príomh Ó hÚigínn explains that Facebook sends an HTML post request containing the text a user writes. He observed this network traffic using Firefox Devtools. “This is outright Orwellian, and...