A former employee of the U.S. State Department has been sentenced to close to five years in prison for an online sextortion scheme targeting young women. On Monday, U.S. District Judge Eleanor Ross sentenced 36-year-old Michael C. Ford to 57 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release, reports the Washington Times. ...

Some of the world's most popular news and entertainment websites have been spreading poisoned adverts to potentially hundreds of thousands of visitors, putting innocent readers at risk of having their computers hit by threats such as ransomware. Famous sites which displayed the malicious ads and endangered visiting computers include MSN, bbc.com, the...

Did you visit a Rosen Hotels & Resorts property between September 2014 and February 2016? If so, there's a chance that your credit card details may be in the hands of a criminal gang. Rosen Hotels has published a statement on its website, revealing that it is the latest in a long line of hotel chains and retailers to have suffered at the hands of...

The RSA Conference is taking place in San Francisco this week, and all the big names in computer security have converged on the Moscone Center where they will happily tell you all about their products, services and latest research. And the only cost for you is that the vendors will likely want to scan your badge if they think you're a potential lead....

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 Clicker...

Security researchers are warning owners of Android smartphones about a new malware attack, spreading via SMS text messages. As the team at Scandinavian security group CSIS describes, malware known as MazarBOT is being distributed via SMS in Denmark and is likely to also be encountered in other countries. Victims' first encounter with the malware...

Sometimes things would be better if people didn't keep their word. Take hackers, for instance. Hackers using the online handle "DotGovs" published information about 9,000 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) workers earlier this week after stealing it from the Department of Justice's intranet. Many of us probably hoped that DotGovs couldn't be relied...

It's one of Microsoft's best kept secrets. First released in 2009, the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit from Microsoft (EMET for short) has been helping companies reduce the risk of being exploited via unknown vulnerabilities in Windows and Windows applications. By detecting and preventing the buffer overflows and memory corruption vulnerabilities...

For twenty years people have been running Java in their browsers. And for much of that time, malicious hackers have been exploiting vulnerabilities in the plugin to infect computers. Although the number of outbreaks caused by zero-day vulnerabilities found in the Java plugin has reduced in recent years, many users have found it hard to muster move love...

In January, I discussed how scammers commonly use money-based schemes, bot spam, pay-per-follower ploys, illegitimate direct messages (DMs), and worms to harass Twitter users. These malicious actors are in it for the money and/or for unauthorized access. They do not care where or how they need to compromise someone in order to obtain what they want, a...

Aerospace parts manufacturer FACC says that its financial accounting department has been attacked by hackers, who managed to steal approximately €50 million ($54.5 million) from its coffers. Perhaps surprisingly, the company, whose largest shareholder is a Chinese aviation corporation, appears not to have been hacked for its data or intellectual...

European data center services provider Interxion recently announced it had suffered a security data breach, potentially exposing the personal information of more than 23,000 existing and prospective customers. The company notified affected customers via email this weekend, saying it had become aware of the...

Normally when you see a headline referring to intelligence agencies and phone accounts being hacked, you expect in this day and age that it's law enforcement that is doing the hacking. But not in this case. Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper appears to have become the latest to fall foul of hackers, after a teenage hacker called "Cracka"...

Fancy earning $100,000? Of course, you do. Well, now there's an opportunity to earn a huge reward if you can demonstrate how Adobe Flash can be exploited. Sounds good right? Well, here's the bad news for the rest of us: it's not Adobe offering the money in the form of a bug bounty. Less than a month ago, Adobe proudly announced a series of security...

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 would...

At least 30 Twitter accounts received a disturbing message from the site late last week, warning that they may have been targeted by government or state-sponsored hackers. Canadian non-profit Coldhak, which focuses on privacy and freedom of speech issues, was one of the first to reveal that they had received the warning from Twitter, and included a...

Last month, Microsoft released a report on the advanced threat group Fancy Bear. This alert, as noted by security blogger Graham Cluely, explains how the group—otherwise known as "Sofacy," "Sednit," "STRONTIUM," and "APT 28"—stalks mailing lists, social media sites, and public forums in search of potential victims from whom it can steal login...

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, TX....

There are often (quite rightly) concerns raised about operating system vulnerabilities on smartphones, and the need for users to patch their devices with the latest software. But the truth is that probably a bigger risk to the typical mobile user are the actual apps that they choose to run on them. Have they been coded reliably, are they taking enough...

Yes, targeted attacks - especially those perpetrated by an adversary with considerable resources, such as a foreign state - may incorporate zero-day vulnerabilities, but often they begin with something as simple as a phishing message tricking your staff into handing over their passwords. That's a lesson you learn from a new report published by Microsoft...