Robert Lemos

Using spear phishing attacks to compromise financial workers’ systems, a gang of cyber-criminals has stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from banks in Russia, Ukraine, China, Germany and the United States during a two-year crime spree, security firm Kaspersky Lab stated in a report published on Feb. 16. The cyber-thieves sent malware-laden documents to bank […]

Attackers continue to target mobile devices with a variety of adware and malware, which led to a 25 percent increase in infections in 2014, according to a report published on Feb. 12 by mobile security firm Alcatel-Lucent. The company, which monitors malicious activity on Internet service provider (ISP) and cellular networks, found that 0.68 percent […]

Corporate employees continue to expand their use of the cloud, an overall trend that simultaneously continues to increase risks to data security, according to a quarterly look at cloud usage published by Skyhigh Networks. In the fourth quarter of 2014, the average company used 897 cloud services, a 43 percent increase over the same quarter […]

A suspected Chinese espionage group compromised popular media site Forbes.com in November 2014 in an operation designed to infect computers at companies in the financial and defense industries, according to a report published on Feb. 10 by security firms Invincea and iSIGHT Partners. The attack infected Forbes.com’s “Thought of the Day” Adobe Flash widget and […]

Few users who encounter an alert through their browser actually read or understand the suggested advice but can be guided to take corrective action, according to a study by Google and University of Pennsylvania researchers, who hope to find ways to fix the problems. In a study to be presented in April, the group of […]

The attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment will cost consumer giant Sony an estimated $35 million in investigation and remediation fees through March 2015, the company told investors on Feb. 4. During its third-quarter earnings announcement, Kenichiro Yoshida, Sony’s chief financial officer, told investors that it paid an estimated $15 million to investigate the cyber-attack and […]

The allure of big data for companies and researchers is in its ability to make connections between disparate events, allowing better insight into the relationships in the data. However, for the individuals whose data is collected, big data also means far less privacy. The latest example, published by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers, found that […]

In early January, Google’s Project Zero—a 6-month-old effort to hunt for bugs in popular software—released, for the second time, information on a vulnerability in Microsoft software before the software giant had patched the issue. Not two weeks later, Google took the same action for security issues in Apple’s products. Google has argued that holding every […]

Malware code reportedly leaked from the National Security Agency has been linked to a sophisticated cyber-attack framework, known as Regin, which had previously been used to attack political targets in Russia and the Middle East. In an analysis published on Jan. 27, researchers from security firm Kaspersky Lab highlighted similarities between Regin’s code and code […]

Attackers are actively compromising Windows systems using an exploit for a previously unknown vulnerability in Adobe’s Flash software, according to an analysis of attack traffic by a researcher known as Kafeine. The attack, confirmed by security firms Symantec and Malwarebytes, is part of a suite of exploits included in the Angler exploit kit, software sold […]