Olympic themed fraud, email scams, and spam campaigns are so banal right now that the official website of the 2012 London Olympic Games contains not only a ‘stay safe online’ page but has also compiled a downloadable list of known scams.
Attackers and malware writers, like many other people, tend to specialize, honing their skills in one particular discipline in order to maximize their chances for success. But Microsoft researchers have come across a series of malware samples and exploits that show that some attackers are beginning to target the same vulnerability across multiple platforms as a way to make the most out of their efforts.
LAS VEGAS–Microsoft on Thursday handed out three rather large checks to a trio of security researchers, the largest one–$200,000–going to Vasillis Pappas who won the company’s first Blue Hat Prize competition for defensive technologies. Pappas’s kBouncer ROP mitigation technology edged out ROP-related submissions from the two other finalists, and will be integrated by Microsoft in the near future.
By Rob LemosLAS VEGAS — If Jared DeMott hadn’t been eager to take a different path, he would never be in security, much less a finalist in Microsoft’s search for defensive technologies, known as the Blue Hat Prize.
The information of nearly 4,000 patients at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) may have been leaked according to a report from the Boston Globe over the weekend. A laptop was stolen from the Harvard-associated teaching hospital on May 22 that could yield the incomplete medical records of 3,900 patients.
A new international cyber security alliance announced plans to put the Continents best heads together to try to envision future cyber security trends.
Yahoo announced today it’s fixed the security hole that allowed a hacker group this week to post some 450,000 email addresses and passwords belonging to freelance writers.
Hackers broke into a development server at Formspring, a social Q&A site, and made off with the password hashes for 420,000 users and later posted them online. The company has reset all of the users’ passwords and said it also has changed the way that it handles passwords.Formspring officials said on Tuesday that they had discovered the incident that morning and later discovered that some of the hashes had been posted online. The company decided to reset the passwords for all of its users.
Microsoft issued nine bulletins fixing 16 vulnerabilities in the July 2012 edition of Patch Tuesday. Three of the bulletins received Microsoft’s most severe ‘critical’ rating, while the remaining six were deemed merely ‘important.’
UPDATED–In the wake of the Flame malware attack, which involved the use of a fraudulent Microsoft digital certificate, the software giant has reviewed its certificates and found nearly 30 that aren’t as secure as the company would like and has revoked them. Microsoft also released its new updater for certificates as a critical update for Windows Vista and later versions as part of today’s July Patch Tuesday.
Infosec Insider content is written by a trusted community of Threatpost cybersecurity subject matter experts. Each contribution has a goal of bringing a unique voice to important cybersecurity topics. Content strives to be of the highest quality, objective and non-commercial.
Sponsored Content is paid for by an advertiser. Sponsored content is written and edited by members of our sponsor community. This content creates an opportunity for a sponsor to provide insight and commentary from their point-of-view directly to the Threatpost audience. The Threatpost editorial team does not participate in the writing or editing of Sponsored Content.
