Robert Lemos

A simple Website vulnerability could have allowed anyone to use a browser to look at the mobile-phone messaging records of a Verizon Wireless subscriber just by knowing a target’s cell phone number. The Website flaw, which was discovered on Aug. 7 and fixed by mid-September, enabled anyone to exploit an export data function on the […]

Press-release distribution service PR Newswire acknowledged Oct. 16 that hackers had stolen the user names and passwords belonging to the accounts of several thousand corporate clients. The credentials were found on the same Internet server as the stolen source code for a number of Adobe products, linking the hacking group to that attack, as well. […]

While the vast majority of denial-of-service attacks continues to be the typical background “noise” of rival gamers, online criminals and Internet vandals causing problems for each other, the more serious, higher-bandwidth attacks have quadrupled, according to a quarterly report released Oct. 16 by Arbor Networks. Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks exceeding 20G bps, which will overwhelm almost […]

The reported arrests of the creator of the Blackhole exploit kit, only referred to as “Paunch,” and his partner in Russia will send a message to other cyber-criminals that they are not beyond the reach of law enforcement, but otherwise will have little real impact on the criminal underground, experts said this week. On Oct. […]

Microsoft awarded more than $128,000 in bounties to researchers for finding vulnerabilities in its products, including a whopping $100,000 reward to one researcher for finding a way to get around all of Windows 8’s defenses. The bounties, part of a reward-for-bugs program kicked off by Microsoft in June, were announced this week on Microsoft’s regularly […]

Two separate espionage groups are making highly targeted attacks on the networks of government agencies and private corporations in search of military, political and industrial secrets, according to independent research efforts by Kaspersky Lab and Symantec. One group, in operation since 2011, has compromised hundreds of computer systems at companies and government agencies in Japan, […]

Trade tensions between China and the United States have fueled long-running economic espionage campaigns; the civil war in Syria has resulted in Website defacements by the Syrian Electronic Army; and the rhetoric on the Korean peninsula has led to destructive cyber-attacks on the South. While global conflicts before the Internet era have had no cyber […]

For most companies, blocking a cloud service like Netflix is a no brainer, as it saps both bandwidth and productivity. Yet, IT administrators need to think differently about cloud services to better secure their company and its data, Rajiv Gupta, co-founder and CEO of cloud security firm Skyhigh Networks, told eWEEK. In a study released […]

Using a desktop scanner, a light-sensitive printed circuit board and white wood glue, a group of researchers from the Chaos Computer Club in Germany broke the security of Apple’s TouchID fingerprint sensor, creating a fake fingerprint to unlock Apple’s latest smartphone, the iPhone 5S. The hack, announced on Sept. 21, came less than 48 hours […]

Network breaches have become the top concern for security professionals, replacing worries over a company’s compliance with federal and industry regulations, according to two surveys released in the past week. A survey of 272 security managers and network engineers, titled “What Keeps IT Pros Up at Night” found that 34 percent of respondents worry most […]

A crowdsourced effort to spur interest in breaking Apple’s latest security enhancement to the iPhone—the TouchID fingerprint sensor—has resulted in an ad hoc bounty program that reached nearly $20,000 in less than two days. A series of bantering tweets between security researchers on Sept. 18 evolved into a site, IsTouchIDHackedYet.com, that tracks the individual bounties […]

A professional group of hackers, likely based in China, has infiltrated government agencies, multinational companies and even security firms, using sophisticated tactics and tools, according to a report released by Symantec on Sept. 18. The group, dubbed “Hidden Lynx” by Symantec researchers, has attacked hundreds of organizations since the first signs of their attacks became […]