German engineering company Siemens has patched two vulnerabilities affecting some of its SIMATIC controllers. The first vulnerability (CVE-2016-3949) is a denial-of-service (DoS) bug that affects SIMATIC S7-300 CPU, a product which is used by companies worldwide to manage process control in various industrial environments including Chemical, Energy,...

A Canadian university has paid a ransom fee of $20,000 CDN following a ransomware attack against its computer systems. Linda Dalgetty, Vice-President of Finance and Services at the University of Calgary, announced the ransom payment on Tuesday in a statement posted to the school's website: "As part of efforts to maintain all options to address...

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has issued an alert, warning users of a spike in reported extortion email attempts connected to recent high-profile data breaches. According to the advisory, targeted individuals are told that their personal information—such as their name, phone number, address, credit card information, and other...

Google has announced plans that will help kill off the need for passwords on Android mobile devices. During his Friday talk at Google I/O, an annual software developer conference, Daniel Kaufman of the tech giant's Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) division revealed the upcoming roll-out of Trust API. Instead of relying on passwords, Trust API...

A hacker responsible for the Hacking Team leaks stole approximately US$11,000 in Bitcoin and donated it to an ecological initiative in Syria known as the Rojava Plan. The hacker, who claimed responsibility last June for a data heist against the Italian spyware firm Hacking Team, announced his donation on Twitter in early May. https://twitter.com...

Some people really know how to hack – others don't but say they do. In either case, it's important to know your limits so you don't get ahead of yourself. One wannabe hacker didn't follow this advice. Now he's facing decades of jail time for an ill-conceived extortion scheme. On Monday, a federal jury sitting in Nashville found Michael Mancil Brown,...

The LinkedIn hack of 2012 just got a whole lot worse. If you recall, in 2012 LinkedIn reset users' passwords after hackers broke into the network, stole a database of password hashes, and posted some 6.5 million account credentials on a Russian password forum. LinkedIn was left humbled by the security breach, which revealed that they had not used a...

By any measurement, 2015 was another bad year for the world in terms of cyber security. Despite record spending of more than $75 billion USD, losses were still estimated to be around $400 billion, with some firms predicting losses will grow to over $2 trillion by the end of 2020. But 2016 doesn’t have to be another losing year for cyber security...

2015 was an eventful year for cyber security. Major vulnerabilities, including Superfish, "No iOS Zone" and CVE-2015-2502 made waves in the infosec community, as did a variety of criminal collectives – including Lizard Squad, Phantom Squad and DD4BC – that use distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack campaigns to get what they want. Let's also...

In the Internet of Things (IoT) era that we have entered, it is becoming apparent to me that nothing follows a linear progression anymore. The abstract models created by start ups, which can and often do disrupt the industry, promote new ways of engaging in business that are not common sense. To illustrate this, I’ve made a list of examples that...

Almost every week, we hear about a new data breach in the news that reports about a major company losing millions of usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, banking transactions after falling victims to a cyber attack. As per a recent report released by Imperva on Web Application attacks, SQL Injection (SQLi) saw the biggest rise compared to last...

This is the second part of a two part blog post on the factors that can help you decide whether an agent or agentless solution will be the best fit for your organization. Part 1 provided advice from a security perspective. In part 2, I offer advice that considers the implementation and ongoing operations management. Let’s look at operational...

In the spring of 2014, the Federal Bureau of Investigations sent out a private notice to healthcare providers warning them that as a result of lax security controls in their field, the healthcare industry as a whole was more prone to "cyber intrusions" than the financial and retail sectors. Unfortunately, this threat has not changed in the past year...

Truth be told, it's not been the best of weeks for Martin Shkreli. The former hedge fund manager made himself and his firm Turing Pharmaceuticals notorious earlier this year by raising the price of an AIDS treatment drug from $13.50 to $750 per tablet. That particular stunt resulted in Shkreli being dubbed "the internet's most hated man", and you...

Optus, the second largest telecommunications provider in Australia, is investigating a data breach after customer data was leaked onto Freelancer.com. Australian news site Crikey reports that the breach occurred when an employee of the debt collection firm Arc Mercantile posted a spreadsheet...

A member of the hacking group NullCrew has pleaded guilty in federal court to having participated in at least seven targeted attacks between 2012 and 2014. Source: Softpedia On Tuesday, Timothy Justen French, 21, of Morristown, pleaded guilty to a single count of intentionally damaging a computer...

Computer crime is a persistent challenge in the digital age, yet our collective understanding of it is skewed. Many would like to believe that people associated with criminal organizations or state-sponsored hacker collectives are the only people capable of devious behavior online. That is simply not the case. Individuals can perpetuate computer...

Federal authorities have confirmed that Roger Thomas Clark, the alleged mentor of Silk Road mastermind Ross Ulbricht, has been arrested in Thailand. A press release issued by the Department of Justice reveals that Clark, who went by the names "Variety Jones," "VJ," "Cimon," and "Plural of Mongoose," regularly advised Ulbricht on the ongoing...

Earlier this fall, researchers struck a significant blow against the Angler Exploit Kit. Security blogger Graham Cluley explains in a blog post how analysts with Cisco’s Talos Security Intelligence and Research Group analyzed the exploit kit and traced one of the primary locations for its proxy servers back to Limestone Networks located in Dallas,...

If malware on your Android phone doesn't steal any of your information, doesn't spy upon your activities, doesn't infect any of your files, and remains invisible... can we still consider it a bad thing? I think the answer is yes, but some security measures appear to turn a blind eye to a Trojan that security researchers at ESET have dubbed "Porn...