Robert Lemos

U.S. law enforcement shut down online money-transfer service Liberty Reserve and arrested its two founders and three other employees on charges that they operated the service primarily to serve criminals’ need to launder money, according to a statement issued May 28 by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. The five […]

Security companies tend to use the same threat data to construct their defenses against the latest attacks, a practice that causes different security products to fail to catch specific attacks more often than expected, according to a report released by security information firm NSS Labs. In tests over the past 18 months, the company evaluated […]

Electric utilities suffer “daily” and “constant” probes by online attackers, threatening the generation and distribution capabilities that provide power to more than 300 million Americans, according to a survey of providers conducted by the staffs of two members of the U.S. House of Representatives. The survey, sent to electric companies and cooperatives by the congressional […]

Websense, a content-security provider, has agreed to be purchased by private equity firm Vista Equity Partners in a cash-for-stock deal worth approximately $907 million, the companies said in an announcement on May 20. The planned sale continues a trend among many technology companies—including Blue Coat Systems, BMC Software, and SonicWall—to return to private management. Vista […]

A widespread espionage network that targeted a Norwegian telecommunications provider and several groups in Pakistan appears to have links to India, Norway-based security firm Norman AS and the Shadowserver Foundation stated in an analysis released on May 20. The series of attacks, which researchers dubbed “Operation Hangover,” spanned almost four years and appears to have […]

U.S. citizens reported almost 290,000 cases of fraud in 2012, costing them more than $525 million, according to the U.S. Department of Justice’s clearinghouse for Internet-crime complaints. In its latest report published May 14, the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) released data from the 290,000 complaints it received last year, about 40 percent of which […]

When online attackers infiltrate a company’s network, their first target is frequently the password file. By stealing the password file and using brute-force decryption techniques to find weak or common passwords, the attackers can build up a collection of legitimate credentials to make extending their compromise of the corporate network easier. Yet such attempts could […]

A collection of large software companies has thrown its weight behind two initiatives that attempt to make the process of developing secure software more attainable to smaller software makers. At the Security Development Conference May 14, Microsoft announced its support for an international standard, ISO 27034, that defines the process and practices that comprise a […]

The U.S. government dialed up its war of words with China over cyber-espionage this week, with a Pentagon report clearly placing blame on the Chinese government for sanctioning information theft and legislators proposing a bill that would block imports of products using stolen technology. The legislation, introduced May 7 by a bipartisan group of U.S. […]

Online thieves continue to refine their social-engineering techniques to increase the chances that potential victims will fall prey to their fraudulent schemes. Now, attackers are using their access to the victim’s browser to modify a bank’s customer-support documents and add legitimacy to their attack techniques, according to researchers at security firm Trusteer. Because online banks […]