Robert Lemos

The biggest security threats to companies in 2013 will depend on who is attacking the business: Opportunistic criminals will continue scanning for accounts with default or weak passwords, while targeted attackers will refine their attempts to fool employees, business services firm Verizon and security software firm McAfee stated in separate reports. In the past year, […]

A number of major banks have endured massive distributed denial-of-service attacks for much of December, with customers from Wells Fargo, Citibank and Bank of America reportedly complaining that they were unable to access the banks’ Websites toward the end of the month. Despite defenders adapting to new attack techniques, the denial-of-service attacks that started earlier […]

Looking to design their security strategies for the coming year, companies overwhelmingly make use of the annual threat reports compiled by security and Internet-service firms, a new study has found. Nearly seven out of every eight companies use the global threat reports created by firms such as McAfee, Microsoft, Symantec and Verizon to guide their […]

A week after the shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., clues about what set the killer on his deadly path may lie on the platters of a damaged hard drive from his personal computer. Investigators found the hard drive in the home of Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old man who, on Dec. […]

Just as security firms look for new ways to slow down attackers, the bad guys seek out ways to hinder defenders’ efforts to analyze and react to the latest malicious binaries. Past efforts include programming the malware to look for the telltale signs that it is running in a virtual environment—the typical platform for analysis—or […]

A second round of distributed denial-of-service attacks against financial institutions has not yet had the dramatic impact predicted by the attackers, likely because defenders have learned from previous attacks, security professionals said. On Dec. 18, the hacktivists known as the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters Group vowed to continue attacks begun last week aimed at […]

Some researcher thought it was a law-enforcement sting. Others theorized that it was an elaborate joke. But a call for bot operators to collaborate on attacking the customers of 30 U.S. financial institutions appears to be a “credible threat,” said security firm McAfee in a report issued Dec. 13. The operation, known as Project Blitzkrieg, […]

In 2013, mobile users will mainly have to worry about lost and stolen devices, an increase in spam messages, tracking by applications and dealing with security-conscious employers. Malware will continue to be a minor threat for users in the United States, Canada and Western Europe, according to the latest report from mobile-security firm Lookout. Only […]

Hong Kong About one in nine users in Hong Kong, a special administrative region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China, encounter a malware infection attempt every quarter. Hong Kong has had its share of cyber-crime in the past: Antivirus firm Kaspersky put the country at the 19th most common source of browser-based malware in […]

Critics concerned that an “Internet kill switch” could be used to censor U.S. citizens from reaching the world should take heart in the Syrian outage, rather than worry that the U.S. government could manage the same feat, according to Internet intelligence firm Renesys. In an analysis of the weekend outage, the firm found that Syria […]

A fast-spreading JavaScript virus jumped between accounts on the Tumblr blogging service on Dec. 3, prompting the company’s engineers to respond by temporarily suspending the ability to post in order to halt the malware’s spread on the site. Tumblr users who viewed the malicious post, if logged in at the time, would find that a […]

Microsoft won a court order on Nov. 28 to allow the company and its financial-services partners to continue to administer command-and-control servers for two Zeus botnets that had been shut down by the company’s legal and technical campaign in March 2012. The motion for a default judgment, which was granted by the U.S. District Court […]