Lisa Vaas

Vendor representatives on a panel Oct. 25 at Interop boasted that behavior-based observations can stop Storm-infected clients, even after NAC has given them carte blanche admission to a network. Fat chance, an expert said, given the vendors three-year-old detection methods. “A lot of guys who made claims that theyre doing more than AV, theyre doing […]

NEW YORK—Virtual machines are threatening to crack the walls of data centers with a host of potential security threats—nothing thats been publicly exploited yet but a fact thats borne out by a slew of vulnerabilities patched over the past seven months by major virtualization vendors VMware, Microsoft and XenSource. David Lynch, vice president of marketing […]

A malicious PDF attack launched earlier this week is downloading a variant of the Gozi Trojan—the same malware thats been used to steal personal data with a black market value of over $2 million, including bank, retail and payment services account numbers as well as Social Security numbers. SecureWorks, which originally discovered the Gozi Trojan […]

Websense, a security company headquartered in fire-savaged San Diego, is warning that scammers are milking the tragic situation by masquerading as charity organizations. Websense posted an image showing one suspicious eBay auction purporting to be a request for donations from the San Diego Fire Rescue Relief Effort. “Please put the item you want to buy […]

Storm Worm Botnet Lobotomizing Anti-Virus Programs”> NEW YORK—The ever-mutating, ever-stealthy Storm worm botnet is adding yet another trick to its vast repertoire: Instead of killing anti-virus products on target systems, its now doing a hot fix with a memory patch to render them brain-dead. The finding was made by Sophos and was mentioned by Joshua […]

During the first half of 2007, Microsofts Malicious Software Removal Tool detected 31.6 million phishing scams—an increase of more than 150 percent over the previous six months—and tracked a 500 percent increase in Trojan downloaders and droppers, according to the companys latest Security Intelligence Report. The report, produced every six months, this time around found […]

The marketing department tells you when and why its collecting personal data, right? Wrong. According to a recent survey from Microsoft of 3,600 security, privacy and marketing professionals in the United States, the UK and Germany, 78 percent of respondents believe their marketing department informs security and privacy executives of what its up to with […]

An expert on electric power infrastructure and cyber-security says we lack the regulatory authority, political muscle and requisite skill sets to do much of anything about a U.S. power grid thats ripe for attack or failure. A video from the Department of Energys Idaho National Labs—released to the Department of Homeland Security and subsequently shown […]

A PDF Trojan horse is spreading malware by exploiting a URL-handling vulnerability in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 running Internet Explorer 7, Symantec warned customers of its DeepSight Alert Services on Oct. 23. On Oct. 10, Microsoft released Security Advisory 943521 about this vulnerability and public reports of remote code execution. At the time, […]

Hows this for a cyber-crime target: In most industrialized countries, SMBs make up 97 to 99 percent of all companies. Yet most of those small to midsize businesses have tiny IT groups, and most of those IT groups dont have security expertise—heck, they dont even have security policies to manage employees personal use of work […]

Congress : Power Grid Defense Is Weak”> In the wake of the Idaho National Laboratory test that blew up an electrical generator with a simulated cyber-attack and revealed the fragility of the nations electrical infrastructure, a congressional panel on cyber-security is calling for an investigation into how well electric sector owners and operators have implemented […]

Two vendors want to know: “Is your computer possessed? Does it seem like your hard drives haunted?” If so, theyre offering a day of free technical support to cleanse PCs from evil and help users rid themselves of zombies, botnets, viruses and other malware on Halloween. CyberDefender, an Internet security company that uses a client-to-client […]