Robert Lemos

Two cyber-espionage networks are targeting companies and governments in the Middle East—with one effort attributed to a Lebanese group and the other, less sophisticated campaign targeting energy firms, according to reports released by separate companies. The first campaign, dubbed “Volatile Cedar” by security firm Check Point Software Technologies, targeted government agencies, defense contractors and other […]

The younger generation—Millennials, or those aged 18 to 35—consider themselves the most privacy-aware users of mobile devices, but in reality, they take the most risks, according to a survey of smartphones users by mobile-security firm Lookout. While major media stories, such as the revelations that the National Security Agency collects data on millions of people, […]

A non-profit research lab working with Stanford University is developing a machine learning system that will analyze terabytes of software code to find security flaws and fix them. Draper Laboratory, formerly part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is building the system in collaboration with a group at Stanford University led by machine learning pioneer […]

Companies worried about sensitive data leaking out to the cloud should start focusing on four popular cloud-service ecosystems—those of Box, Dropbox, Google Apps and Salesforce, according to the latest data from cloud management provider Netskope. The company analyzed data from its customers and found that more than a third of all sessions from mobile and […]

Companies creating smart devices for the home promise a more energy- and time-efficient future, but are failing to secure their products, potentially making the homes of early adopters less secure, according to a study of some 50 consumer smart devices by security firm Symantec. In a report published on March 12, Symantec examined a variety […]

The U.S. Department of State shut down its unclassified network in March in an effort to shore up the security of its systems following the discovery late last year that spies had access to the network. The brief statement on the planned outage gave few details, except that the agency would be “implementing improvements to […]

Companies that handle credit and debit card data are increasingly complying with the payment industry’s security standards, but are less likely to maintain their security posture over time, according to a March 11 report from Verizon Enterprise Solutions. In its 2015 PCI Compliance Report, Verizon found that companies typically met nearly 94 percent of the […]

A vulnerability in the software development kit (SDK) that allows third-party Android applications to save data to a Dropbox user’s account could have allowed attackers to reroute data to an alternate account, IBM stated in an analysis of the issue published on March 11. The exfiltration flaw, dubbed DroppedIn by IBM, affects version 1.5.4 and […]

Software maker Adobe launched a Web application vulnerability disclosure program, inviting security researchers to submit bugs found in its Web properties, but has declined to pay out rewards for high-severity bugs. The program, announced on March 4, gives researchers guidelines for testing Adobe properties and highlights eight categories of Web application weaknesses on which bug […]

Consumer dynamic RAMs are widely vulnerable to a known—but previously thought to be mostly theoretical—attack technique in which data successively written to a row of memory cells can flip a bit in an adjacent row and undermine a computer’s security, according to an investigation by Google researchers. In an analysis released on March 9, Google […]

The domain names used in espionage and cyber-crime operations hold clues to detecting the attacks before victims’ systems are compromised, researchers with Internet-security firm OpenDNS said on March 5. The company, which processes tens of billions of domain-name requests every day, has developed an algorithm that uses a variety of natural-language processing techniques and other […]

The number of U.S. consumers affected by identity fraud declined in 2014, but consumers whose information was inadvertently disclosed in a data breach were three times more likely to be impacted by fraud, according to a study released on March 3 by business-analysis firm Javelin Strategy & Research. Identity fraudsters abused an estimated 12.7 million […]