A recent fraud ring through which attackers raided high-value bank accounts, nicknamed Operation High Roller (.PDF), employed attacks that were quick, required no human interaction and have already affected several tiers of credit unions, regional banks and large global banks, over the last several months.
UPDATE: The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has fined Wyndham Hotels for a string of data breaches that resulted in information on hundreds of thousands of customers being lost to cyber criminals.
The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), an independent federal agency that helps regulate futures and option markets, was hit with a data breach last month according to an e-mail statement from the Commission that circulated online late last week.
One of the key infection methods for the Stuxnet worm was hard-coded to stop working on June 24, removing one of its techniques for propagation. Researchers say that the date, which is found in coded form in the worm’s instructions, is nearly three years to the day from the date that the first version of Stuxnet was seeded.
Security researchers have come across a new worm that is meant specifically to steal blueprints, design documents and other files created with the AutoCAD software. The worm, known as ACAD/Medre.A, is spreading through infected AutoCAD templates and is sending tens of thousands of stolen documents to email addresses in China. However, experts say that the worm’s infection rates are dropping at this point and it doesn’t seem to be part of a targeted attack campaign.
Bank robbers have a clear motivation for their crimes: money. It’s there for the taking; all you have to do is get to it. But there are a lot of inherent risks involved with robbing banks, and, as a new study shows, not a great deal of return. And yet people keep robbing banks. In cybercrime, the motivation is the same, the rewards are huge and the risk of being caught is far lower. So the question is, why isn’t cybercrime worse?
There is a line of thinking that pervades and pollutes the discussions of many sporting events, and it goes something like this: “You can’t let LeBron James/Derek Jeter/Lionel Messi beat you. You have to force someone else to beat you.” It’s a flawed strategy for a number of reasons, but it’s even more problematic when you realize that this same mentality could be applied to information security.
Software failures were behind 24 percent of all the medical device recalls in 2011, according to data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which said it is gearing up its labs to spend more time analyzing the quality and security of software-based medical instruments and equipment.
One of the attackers who has been targeting Syrian anti-government activists with malware and surveillance tools has returned and upped the ante with the use of the BlackShades RAT, a remote-access tool that gives him the ability to spy on victims machines through keylogging and screenshots.
The number of compromised sites detected each month by Google’s antimalware and anti-phishing systems has been dropping rather steadily from a peak of more than 300,000 in early 2009 and is now down around 150,000. However, the company’s statistics also show that the number of outright malicious attack sites is back on the rise.
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