Last week, we investigated the story of Dmitry Olegovich Zubakha, a Russian hacker who breached Boeing’s computer networks and launched a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against Amazon, eBay and Priceline. Tripwire now continues its series on some of the most notorious cyber criminals brought to justice with Roman Valerevich Seleznev, a Russian hacker who broke into several...

Have you ever had your identity stolen? Or perhaps an identity crisis? I hope for your sake the answer is "no." However, if it's yes, you are in good company. Computing devices, which I'll loosely refer to as "assets," often change their identity, and at times even have it stolen (as a side note, NIST has a much broader definition of asset more akin to the dictionary definition of the word "asset...

Canada's largest Bitcoin exchange Cavirtex announced it will soon be shutting down its operations after a suspected security breach. In a statement made earlier this week, the Calgary-based company said it believed the compromise occurred on an older version of its database on February 15, which included two-factor authentication secrets, as well as hashed passwords. Although it assured...

Facebook is all about sharing. Users can share thoughts, photos and videos but now, Facebook is trying their hand at a new type of sharing: security threats. Last week , Facebook announced a new platform, called ThreatExchange , for organizations and security professionals to easily exchange cybersecurity threat information. The platform is currently in beta with Bitly, Dropbox, Facebook...

In his 1983 Turing Award acceptance speech, "Reflections on Trusting Trust”, Ken Thompson popularized the concept of a compiler backdoor where the compiler not only inserts a backdoor during compilation of a program but also compiles in the code that inserts the backdoor when compiling itself. The core idea of his speech is that we can only trust a machine to be secure if we trust every layer of...

What's happened? An almighty furore has kicked off after it was discovered that for months Lenovo has been shipping PCs and laptops with software pre-installed that could compromise your security and privacy. What software? It's called Superfish, and it inserts adverts into webpages such as Google search results. In January, a Lenovo forum administrator responded to customer complaints about...

We now appreciate the revelation that went public in February 2015 that international hackers circumvented what was supposed to be robust systems and defences, and managed to get away with an estimated $1 billion from a spectrum of around 100 banks located in 30 countries in what has been described as systemic cybercrime. With orchestration, the situation could impact the global economy in a very...

Last summer, security researchers Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell developed a malware program, dubbed ‘BadUSB,’ to prove the insecure development of USB devices. The pair of security researchers revealed how they managed to reprogram the firmware on removable USB drives to include malicious code, giving potential attackers the ability to take over PCs, redirect Internet traffic and more . Recently...

Last month, Michal Nemcok blogged about the lack of security in the Progressive Insurance diagnostic monitoring dongle . By hacking the monitoring device, someone may be able to gain access to and change the behavior of the car, itself. Now, this is serious stuff – vulnerabilities that might impact the operation of the thing that carries your body around town at 65 miles per hour every day. Your...

In early February, the White House released its 2015 National Security Strategy (NSS). Each NSS report is symbolic to the extent that it reveals the security issues the acting U.S. president intends to focus on for the coming months and years. While not constituting “hard,” actionable strategies, these documents help to articulate the future security foci of the United States. Cyber security has...

A security firm has released a report in which it discusses how an advanced threat actor has been lodging malicious software into foreign target computers’ firmware for more than a decade. According to the report published by Kaspersky Labs, the threat actor, known as “The Equation Group,” uses multiple malware platforms on par with Regin, Stuxnet, Flame, and other high-profile cyber espionage...

I’ve been a finance professional for more than 25 years and spent the last 15 years in senior finance roles, mostly as a CFO of both public and private companies. Like many of you, I am often invited by business groups and professional service providers to attend thinly veiled networking events to get the attention of “C” suite officers of both large and smaller companies. Normally, the bait used...

I’ve been an iPhone user for quite a while... starting with the iPhone 4, I upgraded to the 4S, the 5, and, now, the 6. With the iPhone 6, I’ve spent a good deal of time investigating the features of iOS 8 , something I didn’t do when I upgraded my iPhone 5 because it was already setup and ready to go. One of the features I discovered allows for custom keyboards. I stumbled across this when I...

A group of hackers were able to penetrate at least 30 financial institutions around the world and steal upwards of one billion dollars, making this attack one of the most advanced the world has yet seen. According to a report published by security firm Kaspersky Lab and sent to the New York Times , the cyber criminals, which have since been named the “Carbanak cybergang,” used phishing emails to...

Haskell , an advanced purely functional programming language, has confirmed a security breach in its Debian Builds component. According to an advisory recently posted to Haskell’s blog, “`deb.haskell.org` is currently offline due to [its] hosting provider suspecting malicious activity.” The project’s security teams stated on February 14 th that they were working to restore functionality after the...

Last week, we investigated the story of Vladmir Drinkman , a Russian hacker who assisted Albert Gonzalez , another notorious hacker, in breaching a number of American retailers and using customers’ stolen payment card credentials to unlawfully withdraw money from ATM machines around the world. With only three hackers remaining, Tripwire now continues its series on some of the most notorious cyber...

Source: Damballa State of Infections Report, Q4 2014 According to recent research, the average enterprise receives nearly 17,000 malware alerts per week; however, of these alerts, only 19 percent are considered reliable and a mere 4 percent are further investigated by security engineers. As IT teams are bombarded with “noise,” and potentially legitimate threats, Damballa’s latest State of...

A new report indicates that the current malware infection rate for mobile devices is 0.68 percent, leading researchers to believe that at least 16 million devices were infected with malware at the end of 2014. Published by the Motive Security Labs division of the French telecommunications equipment company Alcatel-Lucent, the report found that mobile malware is growing more sophisticated each year...

Anyone who has ever visited blog posts on the Forbes website has properly been irritated from time-to-time by its practice of displaying a "Thought of the Day" for a few seconds before it passes you onto the article that you actually wish to read. We all understand that Forbes has to make money like any other web publisher, but the "thought" (which is usually accompanied by an ad) somehow grates...

It's not your identity they want, or even your credit card number. Those numbers are hard to exploit for quick cash. Banks and card companies have systems that quickly detect fraud. So, why go after an insurance company? Because it’s easy, and they can get away with really good stuff. What the Anthem hackers are after is your medical provider account number associated with your name, social...