Samsung Fixes Remote Wipe Flaw in Galaxy S III Smartphones
Smartphone developer Samsung has reportedly fixed a flaw in one of its newest phones, the Galaxy S III, that allows attackers to remotely wipe the phone’s contents.
Chris Brook
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"Distrust and caution are the parents of security" - Benjamin Franklin
Massachusetts Hospital Agrees to Pay $1.5m After Stolen Laptop HIPAA Violation
Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, a Boston-based hospital, agreed to pay $1.5 million to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HSS) earlier this week, settling a HIPAA violation stemming from a 2010 incident.
Romanian POS Hackers Plead Guilty, Net $10 M from Scam
Two Romanian men pled guilty this week to charges they hacked into the point of sale systems of more than 200 restaurants, compromising the payment cards of 146,000 customers and amassing more than $10 million over the last few years.
Google Chrome is indeed getting a Do Not Track (DNT) feature according to source code published in the developer’s release of the browser at the end of last week. The feature should clear Google’s dev and beta channels before making its way into the next stable build of the browser before the end of this year.
With the latest iteration of the Blackhole Exploit Kit hitting the web this week, attackers are going to great lengths to spread around links to get unsuspecting victims to click through to the first version of the kit.
The University of Miami Hospital (UMH) has begun to notify patients for the second time this year that some of their personal information may be at risk after the health care institution was hit with a data breach in July. According to a letter being sent to patients this month, two employees at the hospital were found “inappropriately accessing” patients’ “face sheets,” documents that give doctors a quick glance at patients’ information.
Despite seemingly endless pontification, it’s still too early to definitively say whether there’s a connection between the Shamoon malware and recent attacks on Middle Eastern oil firms, yet some of the attackers’ intentions may be getting clearer.
Websites that use the Internet domain registrar and web hosting company Go Daddy were knocked offline earlier this afternoon in what appears to have been a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack executed by a member of the hacktivist group Anonymous.
While Windows 8 won’t officially be released until Oct. 26, according to reports over the weekend, the operating system already has a handful of Flash holes that could open the system up to exploits by attackers. The problem stems from the system’s browser, Internet Explorer 10, that’s coming with its own integrated version of Adobe’s Flash Player which hasn’t been updated since it was initially shipped.
Mobile malware continues to run rampant, thanks to a growing glut of toll fraud malware – apps that have been engineered to bill its victims through premium SMS services. The malware type eclipsed spyware this year as the largest application-based threat according to mobile security firm Lookout who found it made up 79 percent of the malware it detected over the past year.
