Robert Lemos

About

Robert Lemos is an award-winning journalist who has covered information security, cybercrime and technology's impact on society for almost two decades. A former research engineer, he's written for Ars Technica, CNET, eWEEK, MIT Technology Review, Threatpost and ZDNet. He won the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi award from the Society of Professional Journalists in 2003 for his coverage of the Blaster worm and its impact, and the SANS Institute's Top Cybersecurity Journalists in 2010 and 2014.

Three Out of Four Companies Still Vulnerable to Heartbleed

Nearly three-quarters of the Global 2000 continue to be vulnerable to attack because they have not fully hardened their systems against the effects of the OpenSSL Heartbleed vulnerability reported a year ago, key-management firm Venafi stated in a report released on April 7. Using scans of Global 2000 companies’ public-facing systems, the firm found that […]

Enterprises Fail to Weigh Risks of Sharing Data With Cloud Partners

Third-party partners who handle data are increasingly deemed a security risk, but companies do not often weigh the risks of sharing data in the cloud with these partners, according to a report by cloud-management firm Skyhigh Networks. The average company connects with more than 1,500 business partners via the cloud, according to anonymized data collected […]

Two Cyber-Spying Groups Target Middle East Governments, Energy Firms

Two cyber-espionage networks are targeting companies and governments in the Middle East—with one effort attributed to a Lebanese group and the other, less sophisticated campaign targeting energy firms, according to reports released by separate companies. The first campaign, dubbed “Volatile Cedar” by security firm Check Point Software Technologies, targeted government agencies, defense contractors and other […]

Millennials Like Their Privacy, but Give It Away Freely

The younger generation—Millennials, or those aged 18 to 35—consider themselves the most privacy-aware users of mobile devices, but in reality, they take the most risks, according to a survey of smartphones users by mobile-security firm Lookout. While major media stories, such as the revelations that the National Security Agency collects data on millions of people, […]

DARPA Project Uses Big Data to Find, Fix Software Security Flaws

A non-profit research lab working with Stanford University is developing a machine learning system that will analyze terabytes of software code to find security flaws and fix them. Draper Laboratory, formerly part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is building the system in collaboration with a group at Stanford University led by machine learning pioneer […]

Study Finds Companies Need to Monitor Use of Big-4 Cloud Platforms

Companies worried about sensitive data leaking out to the cloud should start focusing on four popular cloud-service ecosystems—those of Box, Dropbox, Google Apps and Salesforce, according to the latest data from cloud management provider Netskope. The company analyzed data from its customers and found that more than a third of all sessions from mobile and […]

Symantec Study Finds Home Smart Devices Wide Open to Cyber-Attack

Companies creating smart devices for the home promise a more energy- and time-efficient future, but are failing to secure their products, potentially making the homes of early adopters less secure, according to a study of some 50 consumer smart devices by security firm Symantec. In a report published on March 12, Symantec examined a variety […]

State Department Shuts Down Unclassified Network to Upgrade Security

The U.S. Department of State shut down its unclassified network in March in an effort to shore up the security of its systems following the discovery late last year that spies had access to the network. The brief statement on the planned outage gave few details, except that the agency would be “implementing improvements to […]

Companies Failing to Remain Compliant With PCI Rules, Verizon Finds

Companies that handle credit and debit card data are increasingly complying with the payment industry’s security standards, but are less likely to maintain their security posture over time, according to a March 11 report from Verizon Enterprise Solutions. In its 2015 PCI Compliance Report, Verizon found that companies typically met nearly 94 percent of the […]

Dropbox SDK Flaw Could Allow Attackers to Reroute Data

A vulnerability in the software development kit (SDK) that allows third-party Android applications to save data to a Dropbox user’s account could have allowed attackers to reroute data to an alternate account, IBM stated in an analysis of the issue published on March 11. The exfiltration flaw, dubbed DroppedIn by IBM, affects version 1.5.4 and […]