Robert Lemos

A sophisticated banking Trojan known as Shylock has gained a new trick: The ability to detect whether it’s running in a virtual machine (VM) that is being analyzed by malware researchers. While malware, such as the infamous Conficker worm, has used a variety of anti-VM techniques to attempt to make analysis more difficult, Shylock may […]

Calling the computerized systems designed to manage critical infrastructure “easy targets,” a security researcher at startup Exodus Intelligence announced the firm had found 23 vulnerabilities in the software used to control utilities and energy systems. In a post Nov. 26, Exodus Intelligence Vice President of Research Aaron Portnoy said that a rival firm’s claim to […]

A study of more than a billion applications for credit cards, bank cards and cell phone accounts uncovered about 2.9 million fraud events linked to 10,000 identity-fraud rings, information protection firm ID Analytics stated in a report. The research examined the interconnections between the people committing fraud and found that some 10,000 groups, consisting of […]

The group responsible for protecting computers at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Trading and Markets Division traveled with laptops that contained sensitive, yet unencrypted, information on the security of the financial agency, Reuters reported earlier this month. Members of the group even attended the annual Black Hat Security Briefings conference in Las Vegas, where […]

Protesters claiming to be part of the Anonymous movement decried the Nov. 14 attacks by the Israeli military against the Hamas leadership allegedly responsible for hundreds of rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and offered their help to keep Palestinians online and reporting on their situation. In an online statement, Anonymous warned the Israel Defense Force […]

Adobe pulled down a forum for users of its video conferencing service, Adobe Connect, after a hacker successfully compromised the server and downloaded information on its 150,000 members. The information taken from the server included each member’s name, username, company, title and email address as well as the hashed version of their password. In a […]

Virtualization may provide logical barriers that protect systems running on the same server, but such architectural protections are not foolproof, according to an academic research paper. The finding serves as a lesson for cloud providers and enterprises that rely on virtual infrastructure that they should not assume that virtual machines are logically isolated and unable […]

Once thought a niche scam by cyber-criminals, ransomware is making a resurgence in Western Europe and North America, security firm Symantec said in a Nov. 8 report. The scam, in which malware encrypts data or makes a victim’s computer unusable unless a specific code is purchased, has likely reaped at least $5 million in the […]

Cyber-criminals are looking for the right model to make money on compromised mobile devices, especially those based on Google’s Android operating systems, and have started flooding mobile-app marketplaces with malware, but with limited success. The number of malicious Android programs detected by Helsinki, Finland-based security firm F-Secure, for example, has soared past 50,000 in the […]

Malware continues to plague home users, with about 13 percent, or nearly one-in-seven home networks showing signs of at least one compromised system, network security firm Kindsight stated in a report published Oct. 30. The firm, which provides security services to major Internet service providers, can detect when computers are trying to communicate with a […]

Free apps are far more likely to track users’ locations and access their address books, behavior that companies should take into account when crafting policies to handle employees who bring their own devices into work, Juniper Networks stated in a report released Oct. 31. For the report, the company scanned Google Play and other popular […]

The theft of approximately 3.6 million Social Security numbers and information on 387,000 credit and debit card accounts is yet another reminder that all IT operations should lock down their sensitive data by segmenting their networks, using better access controls, and regularly performing vulnerability assessments, security experts said. On Oct. 26, the South Carolina Department […]