It seems only fitting that 2014 should have ended with the much publicized hacking of Sony as the American public was inundated all year with one sensational account after another of damaging data security breaches. Those surrounding Target, UPS, K-Mart, Staples, Dairy Queen and Home Depot have certainly received the full attention of the media, as it...

  Patch Tuesday, the unofficial day on which Microsoft regularly releases security updates for its software products, has long been a staple of the information security community. On the second (and sometimes fourth) Tuesday of every month, Microsoft releases a unique set of security bulletins that provide patches for a range of new Common...

Sony’s projected third quarter earnings suggest that a cyberattack back in November of 2014 will have a lower financial impact on the conglomerate than originally expected. As of this writing, Sony was posed to announce a net profit of ¥31.91 billion ($269.54 million) for Quarter 3 in 2014, compared to a net profit of ¥27 billion a year earlier. This is...

Anthem, the second largest health insurer in the United States, has admitted that hackers broke into its servers and accessed databases containing sensitive customer information. According to a statement issued by Anthem, who were formerly known as Wellpoint, both current and former customers are at risk after the hackers managed to gain access to...

On any journey we take as we progress through life, occasions will arise when we arrive at a juncture where we recognise that somewhere way-back, we may have taken a wrong turn, which has brought us to a less than ideal place – an imposition which I believe we find ourselves in today with mitigating cyber crime and its associated threats. So, first of...

Last week, I presented a talk at OWASP's AppSec California titled "We All Know What You Did Last Summer," where I spoke on the topic of privacy, security and the "Internet of Things." My primary focus was not necessarily on the privacy and security of devices themselves, but more regarding the security implications of the data they generate. I used...

Security firm Avast has identified a new type of malware that is posing as mobile games on Google Play. In an article posted to Avast’s blog, security researcher Filip Chytry discusses how a number of games, including a card game, an IQ test app, and a history app, all come preloaded with the same malicious software. The malware first came to the...

In today’s corporations, information security managers have a lot on their plate. While facing major and constantly evolving cyber threats, they must comply with numerous laws and regulations, protect the company’s assets and mitigate risks as best as possible. To address this, they have to formulate policies to establish desired practices that avoid...

Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities can, unfortunately, be found in all types of web-based applications. Indeed, they appear to be rather ubiquitous across the web. XSS falls into the category of code injection vulnerabilities and is a result of web-based applications consuming user-supplied input without proper filtering and sanitization....

A security firm has identified a new method of attack in which hackers encrypt the data stored on website servers and demand a ransom payment for the decryption key. In an article posted on its blog, High-Tech Bridge explains how its security experts first detected the attack back in December of 2014. According to the firm’s research, the attackers were...

Last month, we interviewed Thom Langford, the Director of Sapient’s Global Security Office. Among other things, he explained to us how critical people are to an organization’s cyber security success, not to mention how the CISO is instrumental in framing security issues so that different target audiences can understand them. As part of our ongoing “The...

Tripwire Enterprise isn’t just a change detection and compliance tool. The core ability to execute commands on agent boxes and network devices, capture the results and run the results through a series of tests can be applied to other use cases, as well.  These use cases are limited only by the imagination of the user. One such use case is certificate...

Raptr, a popular gaming social network website, has urged all of its users to change their passwords following a recent hack. In a security update message posted on Raptr’s site, Founder and CEO Dennis Fong disclosed the incident to the Raptr community: “Maintaining the highest level of security around your Raptr account information is of the utmost...

The premise of a January 27, 2015, article by CNBC is that there is good evidence that a cyber attack against nearly any country’s critical infrastructure could be imminent. This kind of reporting has become so commonplace, but this doesn’t seem like just more FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) journalism. According to Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of global IT...

You have done your homework and have identified the security needs to protect your business. You put together the business case and presented it to your executives, who approved the spending. Now, it is time to plan the implementation and you have to communicate with your business stakeholders. How can you convince them that the additional protection...

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a methodology that uses electromagnetic (EM) side-channel signals to attack a computer, regardless of whether or not it’s been air-gapped. In their research paper, Robert Callan, Alenka Zajic, and Milos Prvulovic discuss that their metric, which they call Signal Available to Attacker ...

  Gogo has become a household name by keeping consumers connected at 10,000 feet with the popular Gogo Inflight Internet service. Recently, however, Gogo has been receiving attention and, more specifically, criticism, in the wake of a tweet from Google security engineer Adrienne Porter Felt (@__apf__) to Gogo (@Gogo). The tweet referenced a screenshot...

There are five words today that, when coming from any adult relative with minimal technical chops, are the most terrifying you'll ever hear: I clicked on this link... I doubt any one of us at some point in our lives has managed to escape the inevitable cry for help from a technically challenged relative after they've managed to turn their computing...

  Last week, the information security community was saddened to learn of Joseph Edwards, a 17-year-old secondary school student who committed suicide after his computer became infected with ransomware. Edwards’ computer was corrupted by Reveton (or Police Ransomware), a common type of malware that locks a victim’s computer, claims that the victim is in...

The GHOST vulnerability (CVE-2015-0235), which was discovered by researchers in the GNU C Library (glibc), allows local and remote access to the gethostbyname*() functions in certain cases. Although the vulnerability was just recently disclosed, the vulnerability was introduced in glibx-2.2 on November 10, 2000. Fortunately, this was fixed on May 21,...