Robert Lemos

Although small and medium-size businesses who have not adopted cloud services distrust their level of security, reliability and privacy, the firms quickly become enamored of online services for their improved security and level of service, according to a survey released on June 11 by Microsoft. The study, carried out in the U.S. and three European […]

While early botnets eschewed peer-to-peer communications because the relatively noisy protocol is easier to detect, today’s networks of compromised systems increasingly use the communication technique to harden bot operators’ command-and-control infrastructure against defenders’ takedown efforts, according to researchers from security firm Damballa. In a brief analysis published last week, Damballa researchers found that the number […]

A security contractor for the National Security Agency identified himself as the source of top-secret documents leaked to The Guardian, a U.K. newspaper, that have stirred up controversy in the past week over the extent of the surveillance activities of the U.S. agency. The reported relationship between the contractor, 29-year-old Edward Snowden, and the newspaper […]

The National Security Agency, a U.S. government organization tasked with breaking enemy communications and protecting the nation’s information technology, has collected data on the domestic calls made by millions of Americans from one telecommunications provider “on an ongoing daily basis,” according to a copy of a secret court order leaked to the media. The court […]

In its most ambitious botnet takedown to date, Microsoft cooperated with major financial industry groups, technology partners and the FBI to disrupt the operations of more than a thousand botnets running on a common crimeware platform and responsible for at least $500 million in consumer and business losses. On June 5, accompanied by U.S. Marshals, […]

Companies that take a strong security posture, create an effective incident response team and hire a chief information security officer will likely reduce the costs of network breaches by as much as 25 percent, according to a study by the Ponemon Institute that was sponsored by Symantec. While the average cost of breaches worldwide inched […]

The incidence of mobile malware varies tremendously across the globe with developing nations having a larger proportion of malicious programs compared with more industrialized nations, according to data released on June 5 by mobile security firm Lookout. In its “Mobile Threats Around the World” study released as an infographic and blog post, the company found […]

The average American is less worried about threats to their physical security and livelihood than at any point during the last six years. But they continue to worry about financial and personal security, especially credit-card fraud and identity theft, according to an annual security survey conducted by technology and services firm Unisys. In its Unisys […]

The Drupal project, which manages development of the content management system of the same name, reset passwords for nearly 1 million users on May 29 after its security team discovered that the site had been compromised using a vulnerability in a third-party application. The project’s security team found suspicious files during a security audit, which […]

The U.S. government’s push to improve the security of its civilian, intelligence and military agencies has attracted enormous interest from the security industry, with almost two dozen teams of companies competing for a piece of a $6 billion budget over the next five years for deploying systems that will continuously monitor the security status of […]