The U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI said on Wednesday that they had taken actions to disable an international botnet of more than two million infected computers that was stealing corporate data including user names, passwords and financial information.
When Adobe warned customers earlier this week about a newly discovered vulnerability in the Flash Player software, company officials said that there were already attacks underway against the bug. Those attacks are using malicious Flash files buried in Word documents and Microsoft’s security engineers have analyzed the exploits and found some interesting details.
In parallel with its release of 17 bulletins on Patch Tuesday this month, Microsoft also unveiled two new tools that are meant to help make a couple of common exploitation scenarios more difficult for attackers.
Microsoft has released its April Patch Tuesday fixes, a large group of patches that includes updates for several critical holes in Internet Explorer as well as a patch that finally fixes the SMB client bug that disclosed publicly in February.
In the wake of the data breach at e-mail marketing firm Epsilon, the specter looms of widespread phishing attacks on hundreds of millions of e-mail users whose information was stolen from the firm. But according to Aaron Higbee, the Chief Technology Officer at Intrepidus Group, organizations had reason to fear phishing attacks long before the Epsilon breach made headlines.
Hackers reportedly broke into and installed password-stealing programs on a number of servers belonging to insurance giant The Hartford, according to a ComputerWorld report.The 200-year-old, 28,000 employee strong company sent a letter of warning to some 300 employees, contractors and a small number of customers.
Unknown attackers have launched distributed denial of service attacks on a long list of blogs hosted on the social media site LiveJournal, including the blog of a prominent anti-corruption blogger in Russia.
The take-down of the Rustock botnet in March gave Microsoft another head for its mantle: two in just the last year. That’s an impressive take for any private firm, and one of a string of actions against bot networks in recent years. But security experts say that the company’s success in building a legal basis for moving against botnets is an even bigger achievement.
Researchers and law enforcement officials have been working on taking down and crippling various botnets such as Rustock, Storm, Conficker and others for years. It’s a complex problem, and in this video Ryan Naraine talks with Kaspersky Lab malware researcher Tillmann Werner about the Conficker botnet and options for controlling these networks.
Three quarters of global energy corporations have suffered one or more data breaches in the last 12 months, according to a new survey by The Ponemon Institute, which finds evidence of widespread shortcomings in the energy and utilities vertical.
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