Robert Lemos

A woman from Italy requested that Google remove links to her husband’s murder resulting from searches for her name. A German citizen asked that more than 50 links to an embarrassing exchange be removed from searches for his name. In both cases, Google complied with the requests under the European Court of Justice’s May 2014 […]

An Android worm has borrowed the propagation techniques of old macro viruses from the 1990s by sending text messages out to a handful of contacts from each infected phone. Known as Selfmite, the program spreads by sending texts with malicious links to a victim’s contacts. The original program sent messages to the top-20 contacts in […]

A stealthy malicious program known as Mayhem has started spreading to Linux and Unix servers using the “Shellshock” vulnerability in the terminal shell program known as Bash, according to security experts. On Oct. 7, the anti-malware group Malware Must Die posted an analysis of the attack, which is currently using servers at 37 different Internet […]

In July 1995, a proof-of-concept macro virus, fittingly known as “Concept,” started infecting Microsoft Word documents using a Visual Basic script to copy itself to the default template file. For six years after that, macro viruses written in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) dominated the rogues gallery of malicious software, supplanting boot-sector viruses as the […]

As companies and software developers rush to patch vulnerabilities in the Bourne Again Shell, or Bash, attackers have already incorporated exploit code into a variety of tools, from network scanners to malware, attempting to urgently exploit the vulnerabilities before the lion’s share of systems are patched. Web security firm CloudFlare, for example, has seen 1.5 […]

As part of its plan to reduce its workforce by 18,000, Microsoft has cut an unspecified number of positions in its Trustworthy Computing group and split the security and privacy teams, placing them in separate business groups within the company. While the reorganization has caused some concern among security experts that Microsoft may be de-emphasizing […]

Attackers have begun using a serious vulnerability in Bash, the popular command-line software for Linux, to spread malware to vulnerable Web servers worldwide, according to early reports. The attacks come less than 24 hours after software firms first reported the vulnerability, which some security firms have promoted as “Shellshock” but has been assigned CVE-2014-6271. The […]

More than 20 incidents of cyber-espionage affected government contractors providing transportation services to the U.S. military, an investigation by the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee found, according to a recently declassified report. The incidents, which occurred between 2008 and 2013, targeted logistics companies, providers of civilian air services and commercial shipping lines that provide services […]

From pervasive data collection by the U.S. National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies to the leak of intimate photos and information on dozens of celebrities from Apple’s iCloud service, the privacy failings of the Internet have increasingly garnered the spotlight. While new products have reached the market aimed at helping privacy-conscious consumers better secure […]

When government contractor MITRE came up with its widely used system for assigning a unique ID to each software flaw, known as the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) identifier, the group did not foresee a time when more than 9,999 vulnerabilities would be discovered in a year. Yet, with 6,500 IDs already assigned to software […]