It’s that most wonderful time of the year again: tool release season. With Black Hat, DEF CON and BSides Las Vegas all looming, researchers are beginning to publish the tools that they’ll be discussing during their talks at the various conferences next week. Among the more interesting releases so far is Termineter, a tool designed for testing the security of smart meters.
Dennis Fisher talks with botnet researcher Jose Nazario about whether botnet takedowns are worth the effort, the evolution of attack techniques and whether we can ever get the upper hand on attackers.
A new malware report indicates Android malware samples grew three-fold last quarter and that one in every 140 devices connected to mobile networks was infected at some point.Closer to home, about 14 percent of household networks were hit by malware this spring, with a 50 percent increase in high-level bots, Trojans and backdoors, according to the Q2 2012 Malware Report from Kindsight Security Labs.
A hacker affiliated with a group called TeamGhostShell claims he hacked into a website servicing IT professionals seeking jobs on Wall Street, and in doing so compromised the personal information of thousands of job applicants, according to a ComputerWorld report.
A new survey shows that 50 percent of employees think that their company has been the victim of a targeted attack. Security firm Proofpoint found in its survey that these targeted attacks continue to be a nuisance, affecting both small and large organizations.
Just a couple of days after authorities in the Netherlands pulled the plug on two of the four command-and-control servers behind the Grum spam botnet, the remaining C&C servers have been taken offline as well, thanks to a cooperative effort among researchers. As a result, the number of Grum-infected IP addresses sending spam has fallen from 120,000 down to about 21,000.
Microsoft researchers are warning about a new Trojan horse program for Android mobile devices that sends out premium SMS messages once installed.
A new international cyber security alliance announced plans to put the Continents best heads together to try to envision future cyber security trends.
Residents of Washington State will soon be able to access voter registration forms on the secretary of state’s official Facebook page, according to an Associated Press report.
Support forums frequented by users of the online storage service Dropbox were alive with reports of spam e-mail messages sent to supposedly secret, Dropbox-affiliated addresses. The reports have raised the dark spectre of a data leak at the cloud based personal storage firm.
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