Robert Lemos

In the past year, attackers have changed focus from attacking applications to overwhelming network bandwidth using brute-force reflection attacks, according to a report published April 17 by content-delivery provider Akamai. The two most popular types of reflection attacks, which bounce network traffic off intermediate servers on the Internet, have shot up in popularity, accounting for […]

Scammers are going back to the basics, increasingly using old-school telephone calls to defraud victims, with one group of grifters targeting up to half a million consumers, according to analysis published on April 17 by anti-fraud firm Pindrop Security. Following a warning by the Internal Revenue Service of stepped-up fraud targeting consumers, Pindrop analyzed its […]

The end of support for Microsoft’s 12-year-old operating system Windows XP has garnered a great deal of attention, but for the most part, the risk to the corporate and consumer users of the operating system remains unchanged. Yet that risk is not small. Released in 2001, Windows XP is Microsoft’s last operating system developed before […]

A widespread vulnerability in OpenSSL, the software library used to secure communications on the Web, has undermined the security on hundreds of thousands of Web servers and services and has left online companies scrambling to close the security hole. The vulnerability—officially dubbed the “TLS Heartbeat Read Overrun” issue and unofficially named “Heartbleed” by the firm […]

Attackers made off with more than 550 million identities in 2013, the largest loss to date, according to security firm Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report released on April 8. The return of “mega breaches” that resulted in the loss of 10 million or more records was a major trend identified by the company in its […]

Ransomware has become an increasingly popular way for cyber-criminals to turn infected computer systems into cash, and this year underground programmers are already churning out copycats of the most successful ransomware program, CryptoLocker, according to security firms. On March 31, security firm Symantec discovered a data-napping program, dubbed CryptoDefense, which has already netted its makers […]

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), whose mission is to end poverty and create democratic societies, worked for more than two years to create a social network in Cuba that could act as a medium to bring together dissenting opinions with the goal of creating a “Cuban Spring,” according to media reports. The operation, […]

Less than 24 hours after Turkey’s high court ruled that the government’s ban on Twitter violated the nation’s constitution, the country’s telecommunications regulator pledged to discontinue its latest technical attempts to block the social network by hijacking Domain Name System traffic, according to media reports. On April 3, Turkey’s telecommunications regulator, the Telecommunications Board, or […]

Massive distributed denial-of-service attacks using infrastructure servers to amplify floods of data have garnered much attention in the past year. But other attack techniques using a more basic network packet account for the majority of large-volume DDoS attacks, according to a report published by Internet-security firm Incapsula. In the 2013-2014 DDoS Threat Landscape Report, published […]

Online black markets for cyber-crime tools and stolen data have become more sophisticated, allowing even the least technical would-be cyber-criminals to gain access to complex software and sell their illicit gains, according to two reports on the underground economy. In a report published on March 25, three researchers from RAND, a nonprofit research organization, surveyed […]

A hacked-together program has infected a few hundred Android devices and turned them into low-power platforms for mining crypto-currencies, according to a report from mobile-security firm Lookout. The malware, dubbed CoinKrypt by Lookout, is very basic and appears to have borrowed code from other tools used to calculate the hard computations needed to generate, or […]

In 2013, cyber-criminals armed with malware toolkits created more than 82,000 variants of malicious software every day, infecting almost 32 percent of computers worldwide with unwanted code, according a report published by antivirus firm Panda Security. Yet, the massive number of malware variants—most of which incorporate minor code changes to fool security software—are not a […]