Organized cyber criminals stole more than $25 million from small to mid-sized businesses in brazen e-banking heists in the 3rd quarter of 2009 alone, federal regulators said last week. In contrast, traditional stick-up artists hauled less than $9.5 million out of U.S. banks over that same time period last year.
One of the nation’s largest providers of money-transfer and online banking services to credit unions and other financial institutions is urging customers not to apply the latest security updates for Adobe Reader, the very application most targeted by criminal hackers… Read More »
Prodded by incessant reports of small- to mid-sized business losing millions of dollars at the hands of organized cyber criminals, federal regulators may soon outline more stringent steps that commercial banks need to take to protect business customers from online… Read More »
I’ve grown fascinated over the years with various efforts by Internet service providers to crack down on the menace from botnets, large groupings of hacked PCs that computer criminals remotely control for a variety of purposes, from spamming to hosting… Read More »
Microsoft’s lawyers this week engineered a pair of important takedowns, one laudable and the other highly-charged. The software giant orchestrated a legal sneak attack against the Web servers controlling the Waledac botnet, a major distributor of junk e-mail. In an unrelated and more controversial move, Redmond convinced an ISP to shutter a popular whistleblower Web site for hosting a Microsoft surveillance compliance document.
As a journalist who for almost ten years has sought to explain complex computer security topics to a broad audience, it’s sometimes difficult to be picky when major news publications over-hype an important security story or screw up tiny details:… Read More »
The City of Norfolk, Virginia is reeling from a massive computer meltdown in which an unidentified family of malicious code destroyed data on nearly 800 computers citywide. The incident is still under investigation, but city officials say the attack may have been the result of a computer time bomb planted in advance by an insider or employee and designed to trigger at a specific date.
Jan. 7, 2010 was a typical sunny Thursday morning at the Delray Beach Public Library in coastal Florida, aside from one, ominous dark cloud on the horizon: It was the first time in as long as anyone could remember that… Read More »
A leading security researcher today published perhaps the best evidence yet showing a link between Chinese hackers and the sophisticated cyber intrusions at Google, Adobe and a slew of other top U.S. corporations late last year. In mid-December, Google discovered… Read More »
The recent targeted cyber attacks against Google, Adobe and other major companies were fueled in part by a previously unknown — and currently unpatched — security flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser, anti-virus vendor McAfee said today.