Robert Lemos

A red-bordered malware alert greeted users of Google’s Chrome browser when they visited major Websites, such as ZDNet and The Guardian UK, for much of the morning of Feb. 4. Yet the news sites were not compromised; instead, the warning arose from the hack of third-party advertising network Netseer’s home page and Google’s broad blacklisting […]

More than 50 million Internet addresses house a device that is vulnerable to one of three known flaws in the Universal Plug-and-Play (UPnP) protocol, according to vulnerability management firm Rapid7. Taking a page from their previous research on video-conferencing systems, Rapid7 researchers scanned the entire addressable Internet looking for devices that responded to UPnP requests. […]

Hackers thought to be from China infiltrated the internal networks of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and attempted to gain information on sources related to The Times’ investigation into the mysterious wealth of the family of China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, and the newspapers’ other China-related coverage, according to articles published […]

While a hefty portion of companies are worried about advanced persistent threats, industrial espionage and malicious insiders, bot software and denial-of-service attacks are far more common, according to Arbor Networks’ 8th Annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report released Jan. 29. The survey of 130 companies found that half of businesses had discovered a system compromised with […]

The U.S. military reportedly plans to boost its cyber operations force fivefold to nearly 5,000 individuals. However, the government will have to contend with a very competitive market for knowledgeable security professionals. Pentagon officials confirmed the expansion of forces for the U.S. Cyber Command over the weekend, according to separate reports in The New York […]

Network and security hardware maker Barracuda Networks revealed last week that it had issued patches for eight of its product families to limit access to administrative accounts that could have allowed attackers to compromise the products. The backdoor access could have given an attacker complete access to the devices, provided they knew the password—and possibly […]

In late 2011, trading services firm Henyep Capital Markets came under a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that disrupted many of the company’s service portals. With the attack came a demand for ransom. The flood of packets that hit the company’s trading services topped 35M bps, combining a variety of network traffic types and focusing on […]

The arrest of three men in the United States, Romania and Latvia for the creation and spread of the banking trojan known as Gozi will send a message to other cyber-criminals that they are not outside the international reach of law enforcement, but will likely have little other impact, security experts said. Indictments unsealed on […]

In the last quarter of 2012, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks increased in quantity, bandwidth and duration, with seven attacks topping bandwidths of 50G bps, Internet protection firm Prolexic stated in a report released on Jan. 17. Much of the increase can be blamed on the activities of the claimed hactivist group known as the Izz […]

Hewlett-Packard’s TippingPoint announced on Jan. 17 that it will be offering security researchers more than $500,000 in prize money for successfully attacking the four major browsers and three common plugins during its bi-annual Pwn2Own competition, but will require the researchers to turn over working exploits. The company published the rules for the competition, which challenges […]