Robert Lemos

Three days before the 2016 presidential election, Facebook users began sharing an anti-Hillary Clinton article. The headline, in all caps, declared “FBI AGENT SUSPECTED IN HILLARY EMAIL LEAKS FOUND DEAD IN APPARENT MURDER-SUICIDE.” The article was a fake, naming a fictional police chief and published on an incomplete site called the “Denver Guardian,” a site […]

A collection of rogue applications has compromised more than a million Android devices, harvesting the security tokens for Google’s services and using those tokens to download additional applications and post reviews on behalf of the users, security firm Check Point Software Technologies stated in research posted on Nov. 30. The attack, which Check Point dubbed […]

Researchers at security firm Check Point Software Technologies warned social media users that online criminals have begun using specially crafted image files to spread ransomware using a weakness in some social media services. The report, posted to the company’s website, came as attackers used Facebook and other services to spread images containing links to sites […]

While most people know not to leave their computer alone in a public space, locking the system with a password gives many users a feeling of security. A new hacking tool released this week has shown how illusory that feeling is, demonstrating the danger of leaving any system unsupervised. The tool, known as PoisonTap, can […]

After massive denial-of-service attacks in October, security experts are warning that the relative lack of security of the Internet of Things will continue to make connected devices favored targets of attackers looking to create botnets from which to launch denial-of-service attacks. On Nov 16 security experts plan to testify in front of two subcommittees in […]

A team of academic researchers demonstrated how even the simplest internet of things devices could be used to spread malicious code when they exploited a vulnerability in a popular smart light bulb to infect other devices. In a draft research paper, researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and Dalhousie University in Canada […]

Following a spike in activity earlier this year, the online seeding of malicious mobile programs subsided in the third quarter, while ransomware took off, according to Kaspersky Lab’s latest malware report, “IT Threat Evolution Q3 2016.” While ransomware accounted for less than 1 percent of attacks, the number of Kaspersky users attacked by such malware […]

Almost all companies see Agile software development practices, such as DevOps, as a critical step toward creating more secure software, but few are integrating security testing into the application development process, according to a recent study by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The small-population survey of security teams, industry leaders, enterprises and developers found that 99 percent […]

When a 20-year-old Pokémon Go player sought to capture a digital creature in a Creve Coeur, Mo., parking lot in the wee hours of July 10, he instead found himself robbed at gunpoint by two teenagers who used the app to set lures and track potential victims, according to police in O’Fallon, Mo. The two […]

Tech support scams used to involve cold-calling computer users to convince them to buy dubious software that did little to help victims or their computer systems. Over the past few years, however, the scams have become far more insidious, according to a report by security firm Malwarebytes. From fake antivirus alerts to notices that seem […]

In March, five months after credit-card companies mandated a “liability shift” for most retailers who had not adopted chip-card technology, a Florida supermarket chain and a liquor store filed a class-action suit against Visa, MasterCard and other credit card issuers as well as several large banks. The lawsuit alleges that the mandated “liability shift” made […]

Small and medium-size businesses have major problems in managing their use of cloud applications, according to a survey published on Oct. 12 by Spiceworks, a community for information technology workers. The survey of 338 IT managers found that more than 80 percent of the technology professionals had end users who had “gone behind their backs […]