Brian Prince

Attackers are using a sophisticated and stealthy piece of malware to infect Apache Web servers. The backdoor, dubbed Linux/Cdorked.A, is “one of the most sophisticated Apache backdoors we have seen so far,” according to Pierre-Marc Bureau, security intelligence program manager at ESET. “The backdoor leaves no traces of compromised hosts on the hard drive other […]

A 35-year-old man was arrested last week in Spain in connection with the massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Spamhaus in March. The suspect was identified by authorities only as a Dutchman with the initials “SK,” though he has been identified in reports as Sven Olaf Kamphuis, who has been tied to Web hosting company […]

Cyber-attackers are focusing their efforts on Web hosting providers in order to use their facilities to launch mass phishing attacks, according to a new report from the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG). According to the group’s Global Phishing Survey for the second half of 2012, attacks leveraging these resources represented nearly half of all phishing attacks […]

Last year, much of the blame for data theft chronicled in Verizon’s massive data breach report for 2011 was laid at the doorstep of hacktivists driven by political motives. Verizon’s report on data breaches in 2012, however, reveals that the main ideology driving external attackers could be summed up this way: Greed is good. Overall, […]

Security vendor AlienVault released a new product on April 16 combining asset discovery, vulnerability assessment, threat detection and behavioral monitoring into one platform. AlienVault’s Unified Security Management virtual appliance blends these technologies together in a single product. The appliance is compatible with VMware ESXi and Proxmox virtual environments. It also offers customers easier host-based intrusion […]

Microsoft has been forced to update its own security update to address reports that a patch was causing system errors for customers. The problem lies in security update 2823324, which was pushed out April 9 as part of security bulletin MS13-036. This update was meant to address four vulnerabilities in the Windows kernel-mode driver. For […]

As it turns out, application security has a language barrier of sorts. While security flaws affect applications written in every programming language, a new report shows that apps created using particular languages are more likely to have certain types of vulnerabilities than others. In its State of Software Security report, application security firm Veracode found […]

Microsoft patched 14 security vulnerabilities in its Patch Tuesday update on April 9, including critical bugs affecting Windows and Internet Explorer. To address the vulnerabilities, Microsoft released a total of nine security bulletins this month, including two bulletins ranked “critical.” Both of the critical bulletins, which affect Internet Explorer and Windows Remote Desktop Client, address […]

Microsoft is set to release “critical” bulletins impacting Internet Explorer and Windows next week as part of Patch Tuesday. All totaled, Microsoft will release nine security bulletins, only two of which are “critical” and deal with remote code execution issues. The seven other bulletins are rated “important” and address vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office, Windows Defender, […]

Federal authorities have issued a warning to emergency services call centers to be wary of telephony denial-of-service (TDoS) attacks. TDoS attacks attempt to flood telephone networks with calls to overwhelm them, much the same way attackers will route Internet traffic to overwhelm a computer network. In a security alert from the FBI and Department of […]

Bad system configurations are exposing countless pieces of data housed in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) “buckets” and leaving them open to prying eyes. Amazon S3 is an online storage service offered by Amazon. The number of database objects users can store is unlimited. The objects are stored in buckets and users retrieve them with […]

Researchers at Symantec have detected a new variant of the Tidserv (TDL) malware that takes advantage of the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) to enhance its attack. CEF is an open-source framework for embedding a Web browser control based on Google Chrome. This enables developers to create applications that have Web browser windows. According to Symantec, […]