Uncategorized

When Microsoft went after the Nitol botnet in September, one of the key details in the investigation was the fact that much of the botnet was built by pre-loading malware onto laptops during the manufacturing process in China. This was the clearest case yet of the phenomenon of certified pre-owned devices making their way through the supply chain and into the market. As it turns out, nearly half a million of those infected machines showed up here in the U.S.

Verizon has further dissected breach data from its annual Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) and built a profile of intellectual property theft that points to a disturbing combination of factors leading to successful infiltrations by cybercriminals, competitors, hacktivists and nation-state sponsored attackers.

Regardless of the market or industry, the majority of attacks are financially motivated. Even in data-rich environments such as health care, attackers are still after profits and exploit the same weaknesses and transaction processing systems that are vulnerable in other industries such as hotels and accommodations, food services and financial services. Verizon’s latest Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) broke out data breach characteristics by those industries, and came to a stunningly simple conclusion: Attackers will seek out the easiest way in, take what they need and get out quickly.

Microsoft on Friday said it has reached a settlement with a Russian programmer it named as a defendant in a lawsuit related to the operation of the notorious Kelihos botnet. The company said that it no longer believes Andrey N. Sabelnikov was the operator of the botnet, but was instead responsible for writing some code that was later used by the botnet.

More than three quarters of small business owners claim their companies are safe from cyber attacks, yet only 17 percent of those businesses have implemented a formal cybersecurity plan.This is just one of many problems for small businesses in the digital realm, according to a joint survey (.PDF) released by the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) and security firm Symantec this week.

Apple has released a patch that fixes a laundry list of vulnerabilities in Java after Oracle pushed out a fix for the technology for users of Windows and other platforms. The patch from Apple also completely disables the Java plugin in users’ browsers in order to prevent users from falling victim to new attacks on the oft-vulnerable application.

A wave of spammy direct messages on Twitter contain URLs leading to what appears to be a Twitter login page, but is actually a phishing site trying to pilfer user login credentials.