Lisa Vaas

A California government site that was seeded with massive amounts of pornography and which caused the federal government to suspend the entire state governments Internet and e-mail service in early October is once again serving up malware, security researchers have found. Sunbelt Software President Alex Eckelberry said in a post on the night of Nov. […]

The FBI and New Zealand police have raided the home of an 18-year-old man they believe is the ringleader of an elite team of international criminals responsible for a massive botnet that has infected 1 million computers worldwide. The raid—part of an ongoing Internet investigation into botnets thats code-named Bot Roast—was carried out on Nov. […]

Google has cleaned up malware-serving domains that were turning up as highly ranked pages when searching for innocent terms, but as of Nov. 29 Yahoo was still crawling with it. “I can find thousands of domains serving malware in a matter of seconds with very simple and legitimate searches,” done through Yahoo search, Sunbelt Security […]

Wondering whos causing all the data breaches? Thats easy: Just look in the mirror. Or, as PGP Director of Product Management John Dasher puts it, its “the employment of human beings” thats the most common cause of data breaches. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, told eWEEK that at least 80 percent […]

Humans have replaced buggy software to become the primary target of online crime, the SANS Institute concluded in its annual list of Internet security threats, released Nov. 27. “This year for the first time were reporting that one of the most critical risks is attacks against people, where attackers focus on executives,” said Alan Paller, […]

Researchers predicted that exploits would quickly follow the discovery of a vulnerability in how QuickTime handles RTSP responses from a video/audio streaming server, and they were right: Three have been publicly posted, one of which is in an “almost weaponized state,” according to Errata Security Chief Technology Officer and founder Dave Maynor. The three exploits […]

The cost of an average data breach is creeping up, but the cost of lost business caused by data breaches is soaring. A study from the Ponemon Institute—sponsored by encryption software maker PGP and data loss prevention vendor Vontu—shows that the average cost of a data breach has grown 8 percent—to $197 per data record—since […]

The seeding of malware into pages returned from searches for innocent terms has reached epic proportions, security researchers say. Malicious iFrames, rootkits and fake codecs are being served up on tens of thousands of sites returned as results for searches for such things as alternate router firmware or “how to for Microsoft Excel.” For example, […]

Exploit code is out for an extremely critical Apple QuickTime flaw that affects Windows and Mac OS X systems, and researchers say attacks are likely soon to follow. The vulnerability, found in the way QuickTime processes RTSP (Real Time Streaming Protocol) replies, can lead to remote attackers hijacking vulnerable systems. This proof of concept code […]

Canadian health authorities have lost intimate medical data including HIV and hepatitis test results for an undetermined number of citizens in a recent security breach, the government of Newfoundland and Labrador admitted Nov. 26. According to a media release, on the evening of Nov. 20, a consultant employed by the Provincial Public Health Laboratory was […]