A watering hole attack is one way that hackers can go after an individual organization or type of organization. Unlike a phishing attack it is designed to infect websites that people are known to frequent based upon where they work. For example, they could infect the website of a delivery pizza serv
In Outside the Closed World: On Using Machine Learning for Network Intrusion Detection the authors write: "In network intrusion detection research, one popular strategy for finding attacks is monitoring a network's activity for anomalies: deviations from profiles of normality previously learned from
A security researcher at Google was doing security research when he noticed that data coming from CloudFlare included passwords and other private data. He conferred with his colleges who confirmed the problem. Then he quickly got on Twitter and sent an urgent message to CloudFlare asking them to con
The Deep Web is that part of the internet where hackers sell exploit kits and stolen data. Such sites are often hard to find. Many require an invitation from someone else to join. Some, like AlphaBay, hide behind the Tor network. TrendLabs Security reports that data stolen from US hospitals is show
The massive DDOS attack on the Akamai CDN (content distribution network) that last year took down Netflix, Amazon, and others because of compromised IP cameras that were using a default password shined the spotlight on IoT security. In particular, there is the concern about attacks on heavy industri
As we have said before, it seems hardly a week goes by without an announcement of another security weakness found in Adobe Flash. This week we discuss two. HTML5 was supposed to replace Adobe Flash. The goal was to have a standard that browser designers could use to process video without having to
Metasploit is a tool that white hat hackers use to do penetration testing. No doubt criminals use it too. What Metasploit does is take exploits gathered by thousands of contributors and package them into scripts and a command line and web interface so that security admins and analysts can test if a
Microsoft publishes security bulletins and advisories here. Those warn of vulnerabilities in Microsoft products. You can sign up for updates via RSS or email here. They say: “To improve security protections for customers, Microsoft provides vulnerability information to major security software
A group of hackers known as Carbank, who in 2015 stole an incredible $1 billion USD from banks, have been again using RTF documents with embedded OLE objects to plant malware on computers. They send these documents in emails using phishing attacks. Then they use Google services on the machine to pla
The Tor browser is a tool used by Edward Snowden, journalists, US government workers traveling overseas, terrorists, criminals, pedophiles, and people downloading movies and doing chat to protect their IP address from discovery. But recently there was a zero day defect that unmasked the identity of