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By Nancy Rand, Posted in Security

October 26, Softpedia – (International) 12 new malware strands are discovered every minute. Security researchers at G DATA released report findings revealing that the company discovered 3,045,722 new types of malware in the first half of 2015, a 26.6 percent increase since the second half of 2014, and that most attacks were either adware or potentially unwanted programs (PUPs) hosted on U.S. websites from the healthcare and technology and telecommunications, among others. G DATA also observed an increase in... read more.

• October 28, 2015

By Nancy Rand, Posted in Security

October 23, Softpedia – (International) CCTV cameras hijacked to form worldwide DDoS botnet. Security researchers from Incapsula discovered that hackers had used brute-force attacks to compromise over 900 closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras running the BusyBox operating system (OS) and install malware derived from ELF_BASHLITE to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) GET request floods. One device was recorded sending over 20,000 HTTP requests per... read more.

• October 26, 2015

By Nancy Rand, Posted in Security

October 22, Securityweek – (International) New NTP vulnerabilities put networks at risk. The Network Time Foundation’s NTP Project released an update addressing 13 denial-of-service (DoS), directory traversal, memory corruption, authentication bypass, and file overwrite vulnerabilities in the Network Time Protocol (NTP), as well as a “crypto-NAK” issue that could allow an unauthenticated off-path attacker to force Network Time Protocol daemon (ntpd) processes to peer with malicious time sources, eventually... read more.

• October 23, 2015

By Nancy Rand, Posted in Security

October 21, Securityweek – (International) Flaws in Apple productivity apps expose users to attacks. Apple recently released updates addressing input validation vulnerabilities related to how malicious documents are parsed in Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and iWork for iOS 2.6 which could have allowed an Extensible Markup Language (XML) External Entity (XXE) attack potentially leading to disclosure of data, denial-of-service (DoS), or other impacts, as well as memory corruption issues that could lead to unexpect... read more.

• October 22, 2015

By Nancy Rand, Posted in Security

October 20, Securityweek – (International) Vulnerabilities found in HP ArcSight products. HP began releasing security updates addressing vulnerabilities in HP’s ArcSight products, including an authentication bypass flaw in the ArcSight Logger interface in which a remote authenticated user without permissions could conduct searches through the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) interface, improper restriction of excessive authentication attempts which could allow brute force attacks on the SOAP interface,... read more.

• October 21, 2015

By Nancy Rand, Posted in Security

October 19, Securityweek – (International) Adobe patches Flash zero-day exploited by Pawn Storm. Adobe released Flash Player updates addressing a zero-day type confusion vulnerability discovered by security researchers from Trend Micro, which the Pawn Storm threat group was exploiting in attacks targeting Foreign Affairs Ministries worldwide via spear-phishing emails leading to a variant of the Sednit malware. Source October 16, CNN – (National) ISIS is attacking the U.S. energy grid (and failing). U.S.... read more.

• October 20, 2015

By Nancy Rand, Posted in Security

October 16, Securityweek – (International) Critical flaw patched in Akismet plugin for WordPress. Automattic released an update for the Akismet WordPress plugin versions 3.1.4 and earlier after security researchers from Sucuri discovered a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the plugin that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to insert malicious code into the WordPress administration panel’s comments area by using emoticons. Source October 16, Securityweek – (International) Nuclear EK generat... read more.

• October 19, 2015

By Nancy Rand, Posted in Security

October 15, Help Net Security – (International) Attackers can use Siri, Google Now to secretly take over smartphones. Security researchers from the French Network and Information Security Agency discovered that attackers could use a laptop running GNU Radio, an amplifier, a universal software radio peripheral (USRP) software-defined radio, and antenna to take over smartphones with headphones plugged in via the Google Now and Siri personal assistants. The attack utilizes the device’s headphone cord as an ant... read more.

• October 16, 2015

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Uncategorized

One of the things I like really like about my job is that I spend a lot of time out of my office, visiting clients. Conference calls and web meetings are fine, but nothing communicates like a face-to-face interaction. When you go to someone’s office you simply understand the situation better. One of the telling things I often run into in this physical inspection is something I call Cap-X bloat. Many organizations are fine when it comes to buying things, but they often don’t have the time to implement the... read more.

• October 15, 2015

By Nancy Rand, Posted in Security

October 14, Securityweek – (International) Authorities seize servers to disrupt Dridex botnet. U.S. and European authorities worked with private cybersecurity organizations to disrupt the activities of the Dridex information-stealing botnet by poisoning the peer-to-peer (P2P) network of each sub-botnet, redirecting infected systems’ communications from the botnet to a sinkhole. The botnet resulted in estimated losses of $10 million in the U.S., and authorities are seeking to extradite one of its administrat... read more.

• October 15, 2015