Daily Tech Briefing: May 30, 2014

For at least the past three years, Iran has been using social media to carry out a wide-ranging cyber-attack campaign against organizations in the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel, according to a report published by iSight Partners, a global provider of cyber-threat intelligence.

The company is calling the campaign “Newscaster,” and it involves many layers of deception, since attackers are creating fake identities with careers in the defense industry, journalism and government. The attackers are friending, following and connecting to target victims with the ultimate goal of stealing login credentials, which allows them to gain access to their targets’ personal information or to sensitive computer systems to gather intelligence.

Eric Cowperthwaite, vice president of advanced security and strategy at Core Security, explained that individuals should be more careful about who they are trusting on social media.

Intel officials have introduced the In-Vehicle Solutions family of hardware and software products, which are part of Intel’s Internet of Things Group. These offerings are designed to make it easier and less expensive for automotive manufacturers and suppliers to build connected-vehicle technologies into their cars. The ultimate goal of the technology is to improve the user experience of the cars and help move the industry toward self-driving vehicles.

Juniper Networks and Palo Alto Networks have reached a settlement of their long-running legal dispute over patents related to next-generation firewall technologies. This litigation has stretched on for more than two years.

The final settlement involves Palo Alto making a one-time payment of $175 million to Juniper and both companies have agreed to cross-license the patents under dispute for the life of those patents. The vendors have also agreed to not sue each other over patent infringement for eight years.

Security software and services company, Symantec is warning people to look out for a spam campaign that’s playing on people’s fear of the Heartbleed Secure Sockets Layer vulnerability.

The spam masquerades as a well-meaning attempt to help users secure themselves from the security flaw. But the spam messages also include links to malware that Symantec identifies as Trojan.Dropper and Infostealer.