Browsing category
The Obama administration seems intent on pushing for stiffer sentences for hackers caught endangering national security to 20 years prison time, doubling the current sentence. A stiff penalty, to be sure, the latest in a series of volleys from D.C. to curb the flurry of recent high-profile attacks and restore confidence in the U.S. Government’s
Mt. Gox, the most popular Bitcoin exchange, has had a database compromised and user information stolen, sparking rapid devaluation and temporary exchange freeze to halt the slide. According to a Mt. Gox breach notification e-mail sent to users on June 19th: “Our database has been compromised, including your email. We are working on a quick
…the ‘next Stuxnet’ probably won’t be any such thing, whatever we may choose to call it…
In the absence of any detailed information from the IMF itself, it’s not surprising that most of the surmise around the attack is based on internal IMF memos quoted by Bloomberg, and much of it is rather tenuous.
First: a link to another article for SC Magazine’s Cybercrime Corner on password issues: Good passwords are no joke. However good your password is, your privacy still depends on rational implementation by the service provider. Also, one of the articles that sparked off that particular post: ESET Ireland’s excellent blog post on a survey carried
…whatever the hacker community’s personal taste is in games and consoles, gamers are a tempting target…
Bitcoins, a self-generated hash-based peer-to-peer currency with no centralized regulating body, are on a stratospheric trajectory, will it replace traditional legal tender as the currency of choice for cyber-nastiness? First, a little background. Bitcoins first surfaced in a white paper purportedly by Satoshi Nakamoto. While no one can trace his (her) exact identity, it seems
It appears North Korea is expanding their cyber warrior savvy in a plan that includes sending the best and brightest of young programmers abroad to bone up on hacking, with the alleged goal of holding their own in cyber warfare. On the heels of the recent Pentagon announcement where cyber terrorism acts may be met
Cyber Security pundits have been keenly watching the development of nascent state targeted attacks such as the Stuxnet worm with interest for some time and warning of the possible implications, but now it’s official. According to The Wall Street Journal, “The Pentagon’s first formal cyber strategy, unclassified portions of which are expected to become public
We like to give you plenty of warning when we suspect that something unpleasant is coming down the pike, even if it’s just one of those likely bursts of Black Hat SEO (web search poisoning) that come with a media-friendly event. Still, I suspect that if I told you we expect lots of malicious activity
Over the past couple of years rogue online pharmacies have been advertising their domains on search engines and promoting themselves through search engine optimization. Legitimate pharmaceutical companies have their own measures in place to work on taking these sites offline. The problem with rogue online pharmacies is that they do not meet federal regulations. To
In an unfortunate series of events related to the RSA SecurID technology, reports are coming in that Lockheed Martin’s networks have been broken into by unknown perpetrators. Jim Finkle and Andrea Shalal-Esa broke an exclusive story and reached out to folks in the industry to get to the truth. “They breached security systems designed to
Update: It seems like the initial article is inaccurate and that Paul Rellis never made any such comments about a 14 year old breaking into the X-Box live servers and have not offered to mentor him http://kotaku.com/5805742/microsoft-is-helping-an-xbox-live-hacker-develop-his-talent TekGoblin reports (http://www.tekgoblin.com/2011/05/27/14-year-old-call-of-duty-hacker-hired-by-microsoft/) that a teenager who broke into the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 gameservers last
Recent additions to SCMagazine’s Cybercrime Corner blog include: “Password strategies: Who goes there?” by David Harley, May 23, 2011 Password selection usually involves compromise, but even a short password can be reasonably strong and still memorable. This follows up at some length on a previous ESET blog by Paul Laudanski. “Fighting cybercrime” by Randy Abrams,
… I haven’t recently posted any pointers to our content on SC Magazine’s Cybercrime Corner, and now might be a good time to recap on what Randy and I have been posting there this month (so far…) …
Another day, another Facejack attack. We see a lot of these sorts of scams, alluringly titled posts – typically with a promise to show you who has been visiting your profile (or infamously, video of Osama Bin Laden’s death) – that try to get you to click to see some special content. The latest one
An article came out yesterday from Clement Genzmer who is a security engineer at Facebook. His tagline is “searching and destroying malicious links”. Those of us in the business of digital security and safety can certainly identify with that, especially the part where we aim to identify the criminals and work with law enforcement to
The death of Osama bin Laden has gone viral, with blogs, social media and search engines pumping terabytes of rumor, innuendo and conspiracy theories at the speed of light, along with the occasional kilobyte of truth. As the number of people searching for pictures and videos of bin Laden’s execution has skyrocketed, the criminal syndicates
[NOTE: As we were publishing this articl, our Latin American office discovered another Black Hat SEO campaign incorporating promises of Osama bin Laden videos on Facebook. Click here to view their article in Spanish. We will follow up on this shortly. AG] The malware phenomenon started by the announcement of Osama Bin Laden’s death continues
Not using Twitter or Facebook is, in these times, akin to not owning or using a mobile ‘phone. Last night’s events – the reported death of Osama Bin Laden – proved that we are well and truly in the Twitter era (Twitter reported that over 4000 tweets per second were made immediately preceding the President’s
One that will be of most interest to our readers in the UK, I guess. Our friends at Virus Bulletin are holding another “Securing Your Organization in the Age of Cybercrime” seminar, this time on the Open University Campus at Milton Keynes on the 24th May. The full agenda is already available on that page, and