Fahmida Y. Rashid

With a number of high-profile data breaches dominating headlines recently, especially the latest one from email marketing company Epsilon, smaller companies may be wondering what they can do to ensure how they can survive a similar attack. The answer seems to be training employees to recognize targeted attacks using these “real-world” incidents. Epsilon, a large […]

Security experts warned that users needed to be extremely vigilant and brush up on their security awareness to ensure they don’t fall victim to phishing emails expected after a data breach at a major marketing firm compromised several email lists. Epsilon, a large email marketing services company with a roster of A-list clients, disclosed April […]

The sophisticated attack that breached RSA’s defenses and allowed attackers to steal SecurID data appears to have begun as a phishing attack, according to several security analysts briefed by the company. RSA has faced some criticism from about its internal security practices. During a private call with security analysts, the executive chairman of RSA Security, […]

Silverpop attackers are finally beginning to monetize the customer data they stole last fall from the email marketing company. The spam campaign using email addresses stolen from Silverpop’s database appears to be pushing the fake Adobe Reader update scam. The first sign came March 27 when Play.com customers reported receiving spam with links pointing to […]

Shutting down the Rustock botnet in early March appears to have had an unexpected side benefit: the Harnig botnet apparently has ceased operations. On the very day that law enforcement authorities, with Microsoft’s help, were raiding Rustock’s command-and-control servers, the servers belonging to the Harnig botnet-also known as Piptea-stopped responding, according to Atif Mushtaq, a […]

A mass SQL injection attack that initially compromised 28,000 Websites has spiraled out of control. At the last count, more than a million sites have been compromised, with no end in sight. Security firm Websense has been tracking the “LizaMoon” attack since it started March 29. The company’s malware researchers dubbed the attack LizaMoon after […]

Cyber-criminals shifted focus in 2010 to launch more sophisticated targeted attacks, IBM said in a new report. In short, 2010 was the year cyber-attacks became more about quality rather than quantity. While there was an increase in new vulnerabilities, exploits and types of attacks in 2010, more vulnerabilities were being identified before they could be […]

Security researchers have developed a new method for finding botnets that constantly change domain names to avoid detection. The technique developed by a team of security researchers from Texas A&M University and security startup Narus looked at the pattern and distribution of letters in a domain name, according to the research paper available online. This […]

An Android application is masquerading as a malicious program to teach phone owners the perils of downloading pirated software from third-party markets or file-sharing sites. The offending application touts itself as a nonexistent version of a legitimate application Walk and Text currently available on the Android Market, Symantec researcher Irfan Asrar wrote on the company’s […]

Samsung is not installing a StarLogger keylogger on brand-new laptops, after all. Despite earlier reports, it appears that the antivirus software that Toronto-based security expert Mohamed Hassan used to scan his Samsung laptops was at fault for finding a suspected keylogger on two different Samsung models. “Our findings indicate that the person mentioned in the […]

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers has notified more than 800 of its members that their credit card and other personal information were stolen from a member database. The engineering society acknowledged the Nov. 17 breach to the New Hampshire attorney general on Feb. 24. Attackers may have obtained access to credit card information […]

Nowadays, any kind of unexpected Website downtime seems to bring out the Chicken Little in all of us. Instead of “The sky is falling!” we shout, “It’s a DDOS attack!” All of BBC’s Websites were offline for about an hour late in the evening on March 29 with many of its pages not loading, prompting […]