Robert Lemos

The number of zero-day vulnerabilities discovered in 2015 jumped to 54, more than double the previous year’s record-setting 24 such vulnerabilities, Symantec stated in its annual Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR) released on April 12. The dramatic increase in zero-day vulnerabilities—defined by Symantec as software security flaws that are exploited before being patched by their […]

The alleged hack of Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm, has resulted in the leak of more than 11.5 million documents that detail the workings of offshore accounts held by many politicians and wealthy citizens. The leak happened a year ago, when an unknown source contacted the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), a German newspaper. The newspaper […]

For two days in mid-March, visitors to major news and information sites—such as the New York Times, Newsweek, The Hill and the Weather Network—may have been redirected to Web servers that attempted to infect visitors’ systems with a variant of the Angler exploit kit and, ultimately, ransomware. So far, the impact of the attack is […]

A few weeks after Verizon released a report outlining 18 common data breach scenarios—dressed up with names such as “The Snake Bite” and “The Imperfect Stranger”—the company embarrassingly had to acknowledge its own breach. Call it “Scenario 19 – Ironic Injection.” Attackers used a flaw in the company’s Web portal for enterprise customers to steal […]

The cyber-attackers that targeted Ukraine’s energy distribution infrastructure in December were “highly structured and resourced,” taking down than 27 substations in an attack against Ukrainian power companies, according to a report released by the Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center (E-ISAC) on March 21. Three separate energy companies—known as “oblenergos”—all came under attack on Dec. […]

The Internal Revenue Service, the agency that collects more than $3 trillion in revenue for the United States, is under siege by cyber-criminals and fraudsters. In 2015, a popular scam—where criminals filed fake income-tax reports to collect fraudulent refunds—became even more common. So-called tax-refund fraud accounted for 45 percent of reported identity-theft cases, up from […]

Code analysis has established a link between a number of malicious Android programs, suggesting that they are likely the work of a single developer or the product of code sharing—whether intentional or inadvertent, according to a report published by security company FireEye on March 11. The analysis focused on a malicious Android program known as […]

In April 2015, the U.S. Department of Energy responded to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from USA Today by releasing information on more than 1,100 cyber-security incidents that occurred over four years. While the data was not detailed—only consisting of seven variables, two of which had been redacted—there was enough information for researchers from […]

A ransomware group targeted Mac users with the first fully functional malware program capable of encrypting data and demanding a ransom of 1 Bitcoin, about $412, for providing the key to unlock the data, Palo Alto Networks said on March 7. Users of the open-source Transmission Bittorrent client, who downloaded the latest version of that […]

Pirates teaming up with online spies, hackers “joyriding” in a water company’s network and a man working for multiple companies using outsourced labor to make hundreds of thousands of dollars—these are some of the story lines released in a briefing published by Verizon at the RSA Conference in San Francisco on March 1. Verizon tracked […]

Security researchers have long predicted that malware will arrive on mobile platforms, threatening the owner’s sensitive information and using the devices to carry out a variety of scams, from stealing bank funds to racking up premium texting charges. In some regions, where third-party application stores are numerous and not well secured, malware rates have soared. […]

Online fraudsters managed to fool an employee of photo-chat service Snapchat, convincing the unnamed worker to send information on several current and former employees to the attackers, the company said in a statement on Feb. 29. On Feb. 26, an employee received a single phishing email to Snapchat’s payroll department, requesting financial information on an […]