Brian Prince

Internet Explorer users will now be able to get their hands on a free tool that forces the browser to use the HTTPS version of a site whenever possible. Designed by Zscaler, the tool builds off the HTTPS Everywhere extension developed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and The Tor Project for the Mozilla Firefox […]

A new piece of malware is targeting point-of-sale (POS) systems at retailers, hotel chains and other businesses worldwide. According to Seculert, the malware—known as “Dexter”—has been used in hundreds of attacks during the past two to three months. The malware has hit systems in 40 different countries, with the largest percentage (42 percent) in North […]

Federal authorities joined forces with the Facebook security team to catch 10 people accused of being involved in a massive $850 million cyber-crime operation. The investigation stretched across the globe, involving the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice as well as law enforcement officials from other countries in a case that ultimately led to […]

Analysts at Gartner are predicting significant growth in adoption of cloud-based security services used by companies along with a quickening pace of merger and acquisitions among IT security companies. In a new report entitled, “Predicts 2013: Security Solutions,” Gartner states that the higher-than-average growth of cloud-based security services will generate merger and acquisition activity involving […]

Microsoft issued seven security bulletins today as part of its final Patch Tuesday release for the year. In all, the update fixes 12 vulnerabilities affecting Internet Explorer, Windows, Microsoft Word and Windows Server. According to Microsoft officials, the most pressing fixes are included in MS12-077 and MS12-079, which deal with issues in Internet Explorer and […]

Advanced persistent threats may use different types of malware, but they do have one thing usually in common—spear-phishing. According to a new paper from Trend Micro entitled “Spear-Phishing Email: Most Favored APT Attack Bait,” 91 percent of the targeted attacks it collected data on between February and September 2012 involved spear-phishing tactics that dupe a […]

The gang using the Citadel malware platform to deliver ransomware is now using the name of the Internet Crime Complaint Center in a scheme to intimidate victims into paying. The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) is a partnership between the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center. In an advisory, officials warned that the […]

The Romanian versions of Google and Yahoo were among the sites diverted Nov. 28 after a Domain Name System attack on the Romanian Top-Level Domain Registry (RoTLD). The sites themselves were not hacked. According to security researchers with Romania-based security firm BitDefender, the attack appears to be the work of The Algerian Hacker Group, an […]

Embedded Systems Under Attack As the number of connected devices continues to grow, researchers have started to pay more attention to the security of embedded computer systems and have discovered all too often that many of these systems were not designed with security in mind. At the Black Hat security conferences over the past two […]

Google has addressed a security hole affecting Google Webmaster Tools that gave users access to obsolete accounts they should not have been able to log into. News of the situation spread across the Web Tuesday night after reports surfaced about it on search engine optimization (SEO) blogs and news sites. According to Google, for several […]

South Carolina Security Goes South In October, officials in South Carolina’s Department of Revenue admitted that information belonging to as many as 4.4 million people and businesses had been compromised in a breach. In the aftermath of the breach, it was revealed that an employee was tricked into opening a file laced with malware. From […]

The White House is reportedly making a major push to get input from various interest groups on the draft of an executive order that would implement some of the provisions written into the Cybersecurity Act of 2012, which fell short of the votes needed to send the legislation to a final vote in the Senate. […]