Robert Lemos

In its most ambitious botnet takedown to date, Microsoft cooperated with major financial industry groups, technology partners and the FBI to disrupt the operations of more than a thousand botnets running on a common crimeware platform and responsible for at least $500 million in consumer and business losses. On June 5, accompanied by U.S. Marshals, […]

Companies that take a strong security posture, create an effective incident response team and hire a chief information security officer will likely reduce the costs of network breaches by as much as 25 percent, according to a study by the Ponemon Institute that was sponsored by Symantec. While the average cost of breaches worldwide inched […]

The incidence of mobile malware varies tremendously across the globe with developing nations having a larger proportion of malicious programs compared with more industrialized nations, according to data released on June 5 by mobile security firm Lookout. In its “Mobile Threats Around the World” study released as an infographic and blog post, the company found […]

The average American is less worried about threats to their physical security and livelihood than at any point during the last six years. But they continue to worry about financial and personal security, especially credit-card fraud and identity theft, according to an annual security survey conducted by technology and services firm Unisys. In its Unisys […]

The Drupal project, which manages development of the content management system of the same name, reset passwords for nearly 1 million users on May 29 after its security team discovered that the site had been compromised using a vulnerability in a third-party application. The project’s security team found suspicious files during a security audit, which […]

The U.S. government’s push to improve the security of its civilian, intelligence and military agencies has attracted enormous interest from the security industry, with almost two dozen teams of companies competing for a piece of a $6 billion budget over the next five years for deploying systems that will continuously monitor the security status of […]

U.S. law enforcement shut down online money-transfer service Liberty Reserve and arrested its two founders and three other employees on charges that they operated the service primarily to serve criminals’ need to launder money, according to a statement issued May 28 by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. The five […]

Security companies tend to use the same threat data to construct their defenses against the latest attacks, a practice that causes different security products to fail to catch specific attacks more often than expected, according to a report released by security information firm NSS Labs. In tests over the past 18 months, the company evaluated […]

Electric utilities suffer “daily” and “constant” probes by online attackers, threatening the generation and distribution capabilities that provide power to more than 300 million Americans, according to a survey of providers conducted by the staffs of two members of the U.S. House of Representatives. The survey, sent to electric companies and cooperatives by the congressional […]

Websense, a content-security provider, has agreed to be purchased by private equity firm Vista Equity Partners in a cash-for-stock deal worth approximately $907 million, the companies said in an announcement on May 20. The planned sale continues a trend among many technology companies—including Blue Coat Systems, BMC Software, and SonicWall—to return to private management. Vista […]

A widespread espionage network that targeted a Norwegian telecommunications provider and several groups in Pakistan appears to have links to India, Norway-based security firm Norman AS and the Shadowserver Foundation stated in an analysis released on May 20. The series of attacks, which researchers dubbed “Operation Hangover,” spanned almost four years and appears to have […]

U.S. citizens reported almost 290,000 cases of fraud in 2012, costing them more than $525 million, according to the U.S. Department of Justice’s clearinghouse for Internet-crime complaints. In its latest report published May 14, the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) released data from the 290,000 complaints it received last year, about 40 percent of which […]