> TODAY'S SUMMARY (33 articles)
Today's cybersecurity landscape reveals significant threats and trends as follows:
1. A former employee was sentenced to 32 months in prison for holding his employer's network hostage using scheduled tasks, demanding 20 bitcoins.
2. Research indicates that billion-dollar companies are twice as likely to leave critical vulnerabilities unpatched due to operational pressures.
3. Major updates from Microsoft addressed a record 1,413 vulnerabilities, including an actively exploited zero-day flaw in Windows.
4. Citrix, Fortinet, and Ivanti issued patches for 29 vulnerabilities, some allowing critical security breaches.
5. Ransomware attacks are becoming increasingly personal, with 37% involving psychological or physical threats against victims.
6. Google has increased its Chrome bug bounty program's payouts, reflecting a growing emphasis on securing web browsers against exploitation.
These trends highlight ongoing challenges in vulnerability management and the evolving tactics of cybercriminals.
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// AI-powered summary generated at 08:00
The developers behind the Tor Project, a voluntary IP anonymising project that allows internet users to proxy through to destination websites using a variety of free-to-use servers around the world, appears to have been hacked.
Social media site RockYou may be the subject of a lawsuit from disgruntled customers after it allowed 32 million of their accounts to be compromised, but new data suggest that many of its users are equally unsavvy when it comes to security, especially password security.
ISACA, the not-for profit international association of 86 000 IT security, audit and governance professionals, has welcomed news that the UK government has beefed up the penalties the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) can impose on errant companies causing major data breaches.
Confirming what many internet industry watchers thought would happen this week, Microsoft says it will release an out-of-band patch later today, for the Internet Explorer security vulnerability used to attack Google and around 30 other companies affected by the widely publicised security flaw seen i...
Further evidence has emerged suggesting that the Operation Aurora attack exploiting a zero-day flaw in Internet Explorer came from within the People's Republic of China.
Microsoft has scheduled an out-of-band patch for the zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer, just as other fixes for the problem began to surface. The company has also admitted for the first time that the attack could be used to compromise a computer using Microsoft Office.
Sourcefire has increased the speed of its intrusion prevention system, or IPS, announcing support for a 20 Gbit/sec clustered model.
Despite 45 teams trying for up to two hours at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, it seems that the latest USB drive-equipped Swiss Army Knife - which sports an encrypted (Elliptical Curve and AES) data storage feature - was uncracked.
Following on from Germany's internet security agency publicly slamming Internet Explorer over the weekend and advising internet users to switch to another browser, France's CERTA agency has made a similar pronouncement.
Evidence of further targeted attacks are surfacing, just days after Google and other technology companies announced that they had been the victims of a concerted campaign. This time, the attacks targeted PDFs of those in the US defense community, and occurred more recently.
The Internet Explorer exploit code used in the Operation Aurora attack against Google and other technology companies has made it into the public domain, and has been incorporated into the Metasploit penetration testing tool, it was revealed this weekend.
The internal security risk issue is fast becoming a boardroom topic in most organizations, especially now that relatively rare road warriors have given way to a truly mobile workforce, able to work from almost anywhere, in most businesses.
The Conservative party has published a green paper which, amongst other items of national security, seeks to create a center to deal with cyberattacks against the UK.
Time Inc has written to customers and the New Hampshire Attorney General's office, warning of a potential security breach following the possible misuse of customer credit card information by an employee.
Blackhats and whitehats reacted with typical polarity to the disastrous Haiti earthquake this week. One faction unleashed a torrent of malware capitalizing on the tragedy, while the other organized a series of 'hackathons' to help develop technologies that would assist the humanitarian mission.
Proving that there is no situation too tragic to exploit, cyber scofflaws have been quick to capitalize on the world’s interest in the recent earthquake in Haiti. With so many people looking to reach out and donate to victims of the tragedy, one group of black hats are attempting to rake in some of...
A complex attack on the Google Gmail accounts of human rights activitists – apparently from hackers based in China – has now been indirectly blamed on Microsoft, after McAfee Labs announced last night that the attacks appear to exploit a little-known vulnerability in Microsoft Internet Explorer.
As if companies have not had enough IT security headaches already, it seems that a growing number of firms have problems with their staff illegally downloading copyrighted files whilst at work.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has awarded $55.5m in contracts to bolster a secretive cybersecurity monitoring system, it was announced this week.
More details are emerging concerning the concerted attacks on over 20 technology companies, including Google, that were revealed earlier this week. The attackers targeted a vulnerability in Internet Explorer, according to Microsoft. It is now investigating the flaw, which could allow attackers to ex...