What is missing in the news coverage of major security hacks is how they work. This is because most newspaper readers and writers are not programmers. But a journalist should be able to explain such things in an easy-to-understand manner so that the ordinary person can understand how high-profile ha
FireEye has bought the cyberintelligence firm iSight for $200 million. They had previously bought the cybersecurity research and forensics firm Mandiant to built up their offering. The Wall Street Journal says one reason for the iSight acquisition is to try to prop up its sagging stock price which h
Brian Krebs is where we turn our attention today. This former Washington Post investigative reporter is not very technical, but he is plugged into cybercriminal news and is usually one of the first to uncover data breaches like the Target retailer attack that companies try to keep secret. This week
Stagefright is an Android vulnerability that some have called the worst Android security problem ever. A hacker can use this to gain root access to an Android device simply by calling a phone and sending it a specially constructed MP4 media file in an MMS (multimedia message). MMS messag
France, the country, and Anonymous, the hacktivists, have declared war on ISIS. President Obama has reluctantly done the same: in his Oval Office address on December 7th, the 74th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Obama used the word “war” for the first time in reference to c
One of the more common types of malware to threaten PC users over the last several years has been ransomware. Covered extensively on this blog, ransomware is malicious code that secretly encrypts the files and folders of an infected computer using state-of-the-art encryption techniques. Once encrypt
MySQL database servers, which millions of organizations worldwide rely on for backend database services, could soon be leveraged in massive DDoS attacks because of a dangerous malware variant known as Chikdos. Chikdos was first discovered by Polish cybersecurity experts over two years ago. Chikdos,
Over the last several years, malware has been evolving. From the ‘simple’ viruses of just a decade ago to the complex banking Trojan botnets of today - sometimes capable of stealing millions of dollars while evading modern detection methods - malware has become a constantly changing threat. Security
Over the last few years, malware creators have been moving away from traditional malware attacks that target the Windows OS; instead relying on malware specifically designed to infiltrate popular Web browsers. In most cases, the browsers are exploited via known vulnerabilities in common Web browser
Traditional malware is slowly becoming extinct as malware creators have realized that targeting routers and other Internet-connected devices (the Internet of Things) is more successful and in some cases, more financially lucrative as well. Routers and IoT devices are easy to infiltrate and because t