Fahmida Y. Rashid

The hacking collective Anonymous released documents it claims were stolen from government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton as part of its anti-government AntiSec campaign. The documents Anonymous released July 11 on The Pirate Bay contained personal and official email addresses and passwords of an estimated 90,000 United States military employees. Anonymous announced the massive data dump […]

Security researchers have come across a new Android Trojan that sends Short Message Service communications to prime-rate numbers. This comes shortly after reports emerged that the Zeus gang has come up with an Android version of their banking malware. Known as HippoSMS, the latest Trojan is sophisticated enough to automatically send SMS communications to expensive […]

Imported software and consumer electronics are often shipped with purposely embedded malware, according to a Department of Homeland Security official’s Congressional testimony. Electronics sold in the United States are being preloaded with spyware, malware and security-compromising components by unknown foreign parties, Greg Schaffer, acting deputy undersecretary of the DHS National Protection and Programs Directorate, testified […]

All anyone could talk this past week was Google+, the new social networking platform from Google that rolled out to a limited audience. The only way to see the new site was to score an invite from someone who is already a member. But Google shut down invites temporarily in face of high demand. That […]

A security researcher has released a cross-site scripting proof-of-concept illustrating some flaws in the webOS tablet operating system. Security researcher Orlando Barrera published a proof-of-concept showing how attackers could inject code into the Contacts application on a webOS 3.0 device, Dark Reading reported July 5. He also demonstrated the cross-site-scripting exploit at an Austin Hackers […]

Another weakness has been identified in a Siemens AG industrial control software that would allow remote attackers to intercept and decipher passwords and change device configuration settings, according to a recent advisory. The “potential security weakness” in the Siemens Simatic S7 programmable logic controllers was found in the programming and configuration client software authentication mechanism, […]

Several ISPs signed a voluntary agreement with the music and movie businesses to crack down on online copyright infringement. Most major ISPs in the United States, including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Cablevision and Time Warner Cable, have signed on to help shut down copyright violators, but they won’t do the filtering or monitoring themselves, according to […]

The techniques used by the staffers at News of the World to listen in on thousands of voicemail messages were fairly low-tech, but voicemail fraud is a growing problem, experts said. Rival-publication The Guardian revealed July 5 how employees of the United Kingdom-based tabloid News of the World illegally accessed voicemail messages of celebrities, royal […]

As Chromebooks hit the market, users may be needlessly vulnerable to Flash-based exploits, according to a Kaspersky Lab researcher. A fully updated Samsung Chromebook was running an outdated version of Adobe Flash Player, Roel Schouwenberg, a senior antivirus researcher on Kaspersky Lab, posted on the Securelist blog July 6. After some digging around, he discovered […]

Security experts have long warned that all organizations are vulnerable to cyber-attack and that these days there is no such thing as being “not important enough” to attack. The latest proof comes in the form of Washington Post’s admission that its job board had been hacked. Cyber-attackers hit the Washington Post’s job board twice, once […]

North Korea or its sympathizers were behind the cyber-attacks that paralyzed a handful of South Korean Websites, including a United States military site earlier this year, according to McAfee. The malware behind the distributed denial of service attacks that crippled South Korean government sites were highly sophisticated and had numerous capabilities designed to make it […]

Microsoft plans to fix 22 bugs across four vulnerabilities in July’s Patch Update release next week. One bulletin has a maximum severity rating of “critical” and the remaining three are rated “important,” Microsoft said July 7 in its Patch Tuesday advance notification. The critical bulletin addresses vulnerabilities that can result in remote code execution attacks […]