Robert Lemos

Security researchers claimed nearly $500,000 in bounties for demonstrating previously unknown—or zero-day—attacks against all major browsers and three popular browser plug-ins at the annual Pwn2Own competition at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, B.C. The three-day contest, which ends March 8, requires that security professionals play the role of attackers and compromise fully patched versions of […]

Nations around the world have made spotty progress on national policies to support cloud computing and digital commerce, with a few standouts, such as Singapore, passing solid privacy and security regulations, according to a survey of 24 countries by the Business Software Alliance. In the “2013 BSA Global Cloud Computing Scorecard,” Asian nations ran the […]

Police charged a Maryland man on March 1 for allegedly possessing illicit images of children, following a tip from his cloud storage provider Verizon, which had detected the images in an online sweep of its service. William Steven Albaugh, 67, a deacon at St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church, was arrested at home, where a search […]

Online storage service Evernote warned users on March 2 that unknown attackers had compromised its system and gained access to the information on more than 50 million users, including encrypted password files. Evernote moved to assure customers that their data and payment information remained safe, but conducted a password reset for all 50 million users […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Information sharing—or the lack of sharing—has become a prominent point of contention between private corporations and government agencies. The issue is even more of a problem for critical infrastructure providers, control-system experts said at the RSA Conference. While there are hubs of activity around security in critical infrastructure, companies tend not to share vulnerability […]

SAN FRANCISCO — Security researchers and defenders are using increasingly aggressive tactics to put pressure on attackers and make their adversaries’ mistakes more costly. In the latest example, managed security firm Dell Secureworks discovered a successful campaign that stole information from at least four organizations by co-opting the attackers’ command-and-control infrastructure, the firm announced at […]

SAN FRANCISCO—When asked whether their companies had as many information-security workers as they needed, attendees at the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Summit here just snorted and laughed. With stolen intellectual property and data breaches regularly making headlines these days, no company or government agency feels that they have the resources they need to secure their […]

An analysis of exploit and malware traffic inside corporate networks found that social networks account for few attacks, while 97 percent of exploit traffic focused on 10 applications, nine of which were critical business applications. The analysis of log data from 3,056 companies underscores that internal corporate applications, not multimedia and social-networking applications, are the […]

NBC.com got its 15 minutes of infamy on Feb. 21, when the company’s news portal and sites for other shows hosted a malicious script that attempted to infect visitors’ systems with the ZeroAccess and Citadel botnet software. Attackers inserted malicious Javascript into pages on NBC.com as well as the main pages for the Late Night […]

For the first time, cyber security experts have publicly identified an ongoing campaign of information-stealing Internet attacks with a group linked to China’s military. In a report released on Feb. 19, incident-response firm Mandiant argued that a group within the People’s Liberation Army known as Unit 61398 is responsible for more than 140 attacks investigated […]

A wide variety of North American consumers, from everyday Windows users to mobile workers and Mac users, have a hitchhiker on their computer systems when they go online, according to the latest malware report by security-service provider Kindsight. One in every eight households harbors malicious software on one of their computer systems, the company stated […]

Hotels, restaurants and shops may get five-star ratings from tourists, but many will likely only receive a single star for security. An analysis of breach data for 2012 found that retailers and the hospitality industry continued to command the most interest from cyber-criminals, accounting for 78 percent of the breaches documented by security services firm […]