Robert Lemos

Reports of data breaches rose more than 40 percent in 2016, with 72 percent caused by hacking, skimming or phishing and the majority of records were stolen from the health care industry, according to a report released by the Identity Theft Resource Center on Jan. 20. Using public breach reports and information provided by more […]

The ShadowBrokers, a hacking group, pledged to shut down their operation and go dark on Jan. 12. But as a final act of spite the group released 61 files from a cache of hundreds of programs allegedly belonging to an exploitation framework used by the U.S. National Security Agency. The files reportedly include programs for […]

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security designated the nation’s election technology and systems as critical infrastructure, giving state election officials access to technical and policy aid from the agency. The move, announced Jan. 6, makes the election infrastructure in the United States part of the government-facilities critical infrastructure sector, one of the 16 sectors deemed […]

The number of vulnerabilities reported in Web applications decreased slightly in 2016 over the previous year, with flaws in popular content-management systems dramatically declining, security firm Imperva stated in an analysis released last week. While the decrease in Web vulnerabilities could be considered a sign of improving security for online applications, Nadav Avital, technical lead […]

Programmer Darren Cauthon learned the hard way that the makers of smart TVs—devices that are connected to the Internet and can run apps—may not be making the smartest decisions when it comes to security. Over the holidays, a member of the programmer’s family—later reported to be his wife — downloaded an app for watching free […]

U.S. federal prosecutors charged three Chinese nationals with hacking the networks of U.S.-based international law firms and using information from those firms to conduct insider trading, making more than $4 million from the scheme, according to a statement by the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The three men targeted at least seven firms which advised companies involved […]

The United States needs to continue to support strong encryption or risk undermining the digital economy, according to a bi-partisan congressional report released Dec. 20. The Encryption Working Group Year-End Report, summarizes the conclusions of a nearly year-long investigation by members of the House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee and Energy and Commerce Committee. While finding […]

Google released eight lightly-redacted National Security Letters this week, giving citizens a look at the formerly ultra-secret documents that the U.S. government uses to gather information in terrorism and criminal investigations. The eight letters requested information about specific email addresses or, in one case, the account information for two users. One letter requested information on […]

Microsoft quietly patched the Mac OS X client for Skype in October, closing a backdoor that could have existed for as long as a decade and would have allowed attackers to control many aspects of the software, security-services firm Trustwave said on Dec. 14. The backdoor, which bypasses a permissions check by the Skype client […]

International law enforcement agencies in more than dozen countries arrested 34 individuals in a cyber-crime sweep that focused on customers of online services that provide denial-of-service attacks to order. In the United States, the FBI arrested a 26-year-old University of Southern California graduate student allegedly linked to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that knocked a San […]