Robert Lemos

Microsoft issued an emergency patch on June 3, acknowledging reports that a simple eight-character string could crash the program on certain platforms. On June 2, Skype users on the product’s community forums reported that sending a simple string—http://:—could crash the Skype client on Windows and Android platforms. The issue resulted from the improper handling of […]

From late February to mid-March, a group of attackers used a versatile piece of malware, dubbed Grabit by its authors, to infect computers and steal about 10,000 files from small and midsize businesses in Thailand, India and the United States. The malware, analyzed by security firm Kaspersky Lab, stole usernames and passwords from nearly 5,000 […]

A simple text message that can crash Apple devices has been sent as a prank by more than a quarter of a million people in the past 24 hours. The Short Message Service (SMS) text combines two English words “effective. Power” and a string of mostly Arabic script. Because of a vulnerability in the way […]

Cyber-attackers continue to use zero-day software vulnerability to compromise high-value sites, while research into security flaws is increasingly focusing on devices and appliances, according to data from vulnerability management firm Secunia’s first quarter report for 2015. In the first three months of the year, seven zero-day vulnerabilities were used in targeted attacks—three exploiting Microsoft Windows […]

The threat of a ransomware infection encrypting valuable business data has convinced nearly a third of companies to change their backup strategy, with the majority of firms focusing on a more systematic approach to data backups and disaster recovery, according to study published by Unitrends, a back-up technology company. The survey of 381 customers found […]

Retailers and health care companies continue to be vulnerable to attack through exploitable flaws in their Web applications, according to a report released on May 21 by Web security firm WhiteHat Security. The analysis of data collected from vulnerability scans of the Web applications created by 118 companies found that more than 55 percent of […]

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have more than doubled in the past year, with a shift to a new type of attack that uses non-secure home routers and office devices to inundate a target with data, Internet-infrastructure firm Akamai stated in a report released on May 19. The Q1 2015 State of the Internet Security Report […]

A buffer overflow in a kernel-level driver included in many default virtualized environments could give attackers the ability to escape from a guest operating system and affect the host, according to security services firm CrowdStrike. The vulnerability could cause problems for any vulnerable cloud service, which typically use virtualized systems throughout their operations, as well […]

Attackers have taken advantage of the relative naïveté of home users and small business owners to compromise tens of thousands of residential routers and use them to inundate corporate websites with floods of data, security firm Imperva stated in an analysis posted on May 12. The attack took advantage of the default credentials in a […]

A 12-month study of the social media pages of Fortune 100 companies found an average of 69 probable violations of U.S. regulatory standards, more than 80 percent affecting financial firms, according to a report published on May 12 by security provider Proofpoint. The report, State of Social Media Infrastructure, Part III, found that the average […]

More than 95 percent of companies running the SAP business application platform are vulnerable to security breaches due to unpatched software flaws that could allow attackers to compromise their systems, security firm Onapsis reported in an analysis released May 6. The results, based on hundreds of assessments conducted by the firm, found three common vectors […]

Attackers are adopting increasingly malicious tactics to evade security researchers’ analysis efforts, with a recently discovered data-stealing program erasing the master boot record of a system’s hard drive if it detects signs of an analysis environment, according to report published by Cisco on May 4. The malware, dubbed Rombertik, compromises systems and attempts to steal […]