Robert Lemos

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), whose mission is to end poverty and create democratic societies, worked for more than two years to create a social network in Cuba that could act as a medium to bring together dissenting opinions with the goal of creating a “Cuban Spring,” according to media reports. The operation, […]

Less than 24 hours after Turkey’s high court ruled that the government’s ban on Twitter violated the nation’s constitution, the country’s telecommunications regulator pledged to discontinue its latest technical attempts to block the social network by hijacking Domain Name System traffic, according to media reports. On April 3, Turkey’s telecommunications regulator, the Telecommunications Board, or […]

Massive distributed denial-of-service attacks using infrastructure servers to amplify floods of data have garnered much attention in the past year. But other attack techniques using a more basic network packet account for the majority of large-volume DDoS attacks, according to a report published by Internet-security firm Incapsula. In the 2013-2014 DDoS Threat Landscape Report, published […]

Online black markets for cyber-crime tools and stolen data have become more sophisticated, allowing even the least technical would-be cyber-criminals to gain access to complex software and sell their illicit gains, according to two reports on the underground economy. In a report published on March 25, three researchers from RAND, a nonprofit research organization, surveyed […]

A hacked-together program has infected a few hundred Android devices and turned them into low-power platforms for mining crypto-currencies, according to a report from mobile-security firm Lookout. The malware, dubbed CoinKrypt by Lookout, is very basic and appears to have borrowed code from other tools used to calculate the hard computations needed to generate, or […]

In 2013, cyber-criminals armed with malware toolkits created more than 82,000 variants of malicious software every day, infecting almost 32 percent of computers worldwide with unwanted code, according a report published by antivirus firm Panda Security. Yet, the massive number of malware variants—most of which incorporate minor code changes to fool security software—are not a […]

A sophisticated network of 25,000 compromised Linux servers has become the foundation of a massive cyber-criminal botnet capable of sending 35 million spam messages and redirecting more than 500,000 Web visitors to exploit kits every day, according to a report published by software security firm ESET. A collection of malware, dubbed Windigo by ESET, forms […]

Massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have become more popular with cyber-criminals and hacktivists, especially those attacks that use a vulnerability in the network time protocol (NTP) to produce overwhelming floods of data, according to DDoS mitigation firm Prolexic. In an advisory released on March 12, the company warned that attacks using vulnerable NTP servers have […]

While developers are getting better about hardening their software, the 35 vulnerabilities revealed at the Pwn2Own tournament this week show that security remains a work in progress. The annual contest pits vulnerability researchers against the latest operating systems running four different browsers and vital plug-ins, with the winner taking home the compromised—or “pwned”—laptop and up […]

April 15 marks the deadline for tax season, but consumers and businesses should file their taxes as early as possible and pay more attention to their online tax accounts, as fraudsters are increasingly focused on tax identity theft, anti-fraud firm ThreatMetrix warned on March 10. As criminals gain more information on potential victims, filing for […]