Robert Lemos

The tool is called Social Engineering Master. Anyone who pays the equivalent of $50 can search through a variety of stolen or leaked information and use it to create a convincing cyber-attack targeted at a specific victim or group of victims. The online service is just one of the offerings that have cropped up as […]

Malware and spyware are worries for anyone browsing the less-traveled Internet or wondering whether they should open an attachment from an unknown sender. Yet occasionally, the unwanted programs attempt to hitch a ride on other devices. Florida-based network integrator iPower Technologies found one such device. The company, which is creating a video storage system for […]

Attackers have targeted retailers with a sophisticated malware framework that infects point-of-sale systems and uses high-level encryption to hide its functionality and make analysis difficult, security-consultancy iSIGHT Partners said on Nov. 24. The malware framework, dubbed ModPOS, is very hard to detect and likely has infected multiple retailers, iSIGHT said. With its large code base […]

A ransomware program known as Chimera has adopted a relatively unknown peer-to-peer messaging system to communicate with the criminals’ command-and-control server, making investigating the infrastructure more difficult, according to security researchers. The messaging system, known as BitMessage, is a communications system that allows messages to be encrypted, prevents spoofing and relieves the user of any […]

The once-popular Blackhole exploit kit has returned, attempting to infect using old exploits but also showing signs of active development, according to researchers with security firm Malwarebytes. Over the weekend, Malwarebytes detected attacks using older exploits for Oracle’s Java and Adobe’s Acrobat, but which attempted to deliver recently compiled malware. When Malwarebytes investigated, it found, […]

On Nov. 1, Zerodium announced that it had agreed to pay $1 million for code that exploited a collection of bugs in Apple’s iOS to fully compromise a device running the mobile operating system. With typical bug bounty awards ranging from thousands to tens of thousands of dollars—and only a smattering of past deals paying […]

Software maker Adobe issued an update on Nov. 10 to fix 17 critical vulnerabilities in its ubiquitous Flash player, the day after an analysis found that the program was the most popular target of exploit-kit developers. The patch, released the same day as Microsoft’s regular Patch Tuesday, closes a variety of vulnerabilities found by researchers […]

Over the last year, a trio of pernicious Android adware programs have been posing as popular apps and then been taking complete control of the devices on which they run, according to report from mobile security firm Lookout. The three adware programs—known as Shedun, Shuanet and ShiftyBug—are interconnected families whose developers appear to share code. […]

Nearly half of companies that responded to a Ponemon Institute survey have suffered a breach in the past two years that compromised their business network or data. While three-quarters of respondents to the survey believe threat intelligence is necessary to protect against such breaches, information sharing hasn’t helped as much as the companies expected, according […]

Over three weeks in 2013, cyber-criminals siphoned consumer data from Target, stealing more than 110 million records and causing at least $260 million in damages to the retail giant. A months-long breach at Home Depot, disclosed in September 2014, resulted in the leak of information on 56 million credit and debit cards and 53 million […]

The latest version of the CryptoWall ransomware program has raked in more than $325 million for the group behind the criminal operation, researchers from Cyber Threat Alliance stated in a report released on Oct. 29. The Cyber Threat Alliance (CTA), a group of security companies that have pledged to share threat data with each other, […]

While nearly two-thirds of security practitioners consider the analysis of device data for security to be very important to protect their networks, only 36 percent of companies currently use data analytics for defense, according to survey data released by the Ponemon Institute on Oct. 28. The survey, based on interviews with more than 600 IT […]