Robert Lemos

The fight over the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) has just begun. On April 18, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the bill, which aims to ease information sharing between private companies and the government, a weak spot in the nation’s ability to defend itself against cyber-attacks. The latest bill, however, trumps privacy […]

Cyber-attackers compromised systems at the Associated Press, gaining access to two Twitter accounts from which they falsely reported on April 23 that explosions had rocked the White House and President Barack Obama had been injured. The fake reports caused a short-lived panic on Wall Street, and markets dropped more than 1 percent but quickly recovered. […]

Security software firm Malwarebytes revamped its process last week for testing its malware-definitions file after an error allowed an over-broad check for malicious software to quarantine system files, disrupting thousands of computers. On April 15, the company posted a regularly scheduled update for its definition database, the file its product uses to identify potentially bad […]

Spammers taking advantage of the attention garnered by the Boston Marathon bombing and the fertilizer plant explosion in Texas have reconfigured two major botnets to inundate Internet users with messages that purport to link to videos of the tragedies, according to security firms. On April 16, the Kelihos and Cutwail botnets began sending out spam […]

The average size of the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks jumped sevenfold in the first quarter of 2013, as attackers flooded networks with massive amounts of data packets, Internet-security firm Prolexic stated in its latest threat report. Fueled by compromised servers running malicious “booter” scripts, denial-of-service attacks on Prolexic clients, which see some of the […]

Conficker, a worm that started spreading among enterprise desktop systems in 2008, continues to wriggle through corporate networks. But the total number of infected systems shrank during 2012, according to the latest Security Intelligence Report released by Microsoft on April 17. In the last half of 2012, the average number of infections by the two […]

Targeted attacks have increased in the last year with a larger proportion targeting small businesses, security software company Symantec stated in its Internet Security Threat Report released on April 16. In 2012, an average of 116 targeted attacks hit organizations every day, up from 82 attacks in 2011, with manufacturing companies replacing government agencies as […]

As a popular way to create blogs, news portals and corporate sites, the WordPress content-management software is naturally a focus of attackers. But attackers ratcheted up the malicious attention last week when they launched a large password-guessing effort to compromise WordPress-powered sites. The attack, fueled by a botnet of home computers, seeks out Websites and […]

As a digital currency based on tough math problems, bitcoins have mostly remained a form of underground cash used by technically savvy consumers of questionable goods. Over the past year, however, interest in the currency has exploded, as the digital money has gained adherents. The currency’s popularity has particularly taken off in the past month, […]

Following a surge in rogue antivirus scams in 2011, the number of malicious programs disguised as security software has sunk below 2008 levels, according to data from ThreatTrack Security, an antivirus firm. In a survey of the last five years of rogue antivirus software, the company discovered an uncharacteristic spike in the number of fake […]

Multiple campaigns against a variety of critical industries and manufacturing firms in the past year have underscored the changing nature of online threats, security experts claimed following a report highlighting the attacks. In January, attackers successfully compromised specialty Websites, such as the Council on Foreign Relations and Capstone Turbine Corp. The attacker succeeded in hosting […]

It’s a dangerous online world out there. Every three minutes, the average company encounters malware activity that exposes its information systems to attack, according to the latest report released by threat-protection firm FireEye. Attackers are also increasingly using tactics aimed at escaping detection by standard defenses such as antivirus software, according to FireEye’s Advanced Threat […]