Fahmida Y. Rashid

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 […]

Chinese search provider Baidu has cracked down on pirated material in response to author complaints about copyright infringement. This move comes as Western countries continue to press China to clamp down on Websites that distribute music, movies and intellectual property. Operating China’s largest search engine, Baidu removed 2.8 million items for its online library after […]

Samsung installed a commercial keylogger on brand-new laptops to monitor customer usage, the company admitted after a user exposed the practice in a security newsletter. The keylogger was discovered by Mohamed Hassan on two Samsung laptops, the R525 and R540, according to his post on the Security Strategies Alert newsletter run by Mich Kabay, CTO […]