Robert Lemos

International law enforcement agencies teamed up to take down more than 410 alleged criminal services operating on the Tor anonymizing network, and arrested 17 operators and administrators, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Europol. Law enforcement agencies in 16 European countries and the United States carried out raids and made arrests as part […]

Companies will spend marginally more money on technology and staff to defend their IT systems and data in 2015, but they continue to have problems hiring knowledgeable security professionals, according to a survey conducted by business-services firm Ernst & Young. About 52 percent of the more than 1,800 organizations surveyed expect security budgets to increase, […]

Recent incidents have highlighted that attackers are quickly turning public vulnerability information into exploits, leaving defenders with a shrinking window in which to patch software flaws. On Oct. 29, the security team for the popular content management system, Drupal, warned users that a SQL injection vulnerability disclosed on Oct. 15 was exploited so quickly that […]

A malicious program targeting the retail computer systems used to process credit- and debit-card transactions has continued to spread, doubling the number of infected systems in two months, despite efforts to curb its propagation, according to data from network-security firm Damballa. The program, known as Backoff, infects the point-of-sale computer terminals used by cashiers to […]

The cloud allows for the convenient storage of information for on-the-go workers and gives them the ability to broadly share information with colleagues, but many people do not consider the security implications of putting sensitive data in the cloud, according to a recent study done by cloud-security firm Elastica. The survey found that each worker […]

Retail stores hit by cyber-criminals have to worry about consumer backlash, as customers are more likely to avoid compromised retailers, according to a study released this week by CreditCards.com. The survey of 865 Americans by phone found that 45 percent would either “definitely” or “probably” not shop at a retailer this coming holiday, if they […]

Man-in-the-middle attacks on Apple’s iCloud service and the compromise of a handful of pro-democracy Websites have targeted Chinese users over the past three weeks, according to analyses of the attacks. On Monday, GreatFire.org, a Website shedding light on the filtering done by China’s Great Firewall, posted an analysis of a man-in-the-middle attack that masquerades as […]

More than 4 million consumer and business devices—such as routers, media servers and Web cams—could be conscripted by attackers to participate in a distributed denial-of-service attack because of weaknesses in the Universal Plug-and-Play (UPnP) standard, Internet infrastructure firm Akamai warned in an advisory posted on Oct. 15. Attackers have exploited the protocol to send control […]

A woman from Italy requested that Google remove links to her husband’s murder resulting from searches for her name. A German citizen asked that more than 50 links to an embarrassing exchange be removed from searches for his name. In both cases, Google complied with the requests under the European Court of Justice’s May 2014 […]

An Android worm has borrowed the propagation techniques of old macro viruses from the 1990s by sending text messages out to a handful of contacts from each infected phone. Known as Selfmite, the program spreads by sending texts with malicious links to a victim’s contacts. The original program sent messages to the top-20 contacts in […]

A stealthy malicious program known as Mayhem has started spreading to Linux and Unix servers using the “Shellshock” vulnerability in the terminal shell program known as Bash, according to security experts. On Oct. 7, the anti-malware group Malware Must Die posted an analysis of the attack, which is currently using servers at 37 different Internet […]

In July 1995, a proof-of-concept macro virus, fittingly known as “Concept,” started infecting Microsoft Word documents using a Visual Basic script to copy itself to the default template file. For six years after that, macro viruses written in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) dominated the rogues gallery of malicious software, supplanting boot-sector viruses as the […]