At a time when Apple, Mozilla and other tech giants are taking steps to prevent users from browsing the Web with outdated versions of Java, Yahoo! is pushing many of its users in the other direction: The free tool that it offers users to help build Web sites installs a dangerously insecure version of Java that is more than four years old.
Bit9, a company that provides software and network security services to the U.S. government and at least 30 Fortune 100 firms, has suffered an electronic compromise that cuts to the core of its business: helping clients distinguish known “safe” files from computer viruses and other malicious software.
Microsoft and Symantec said Wednesday that have teamed up to seize control over the “Bamital” botnet, a multi-million dollar crime machine that used malicious software to hijack search results. The two companies are now using that control to alert hundreds of thousands of users whose PCs remain infected with the malware.
Organized cyber criminals stole almost $11 million in two highly coordinated ATM heists in the final days of 2012, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. The events prompted Visa to warn U.S. payment card issuers to be on high-alert for additional ATM cash-out fraud schemes in the New Year.
The Common Vulnerability & Exposures (CVE) index, the industry standard for cataloging software security flaws, is growing so rapidly that it will soon be adding a few more notches to its belt: The CVE said it plans to allow for up to 100 times more individual vulnerabilities to be indexed each year to accommodate an increasing number of software flaw reports.
The Washington Post was among several major U.S. newspapers that spent much of 2012 trying to untangle its newsroom computer networks from a Web of malicious software thought to have been planted by Chinese cyberspies, according to a former information technology employee at the paper.
Nate Anderson at Ars Technica has a good story about how investigators tracked down “Virus,” the nickname allegedly used by a Romanian man accused by the U.S. Justice Department of running the Web hosting operations for a group that created and marketed the Gozi banking Trojan. Turns out, I’ve been sitting on some fascinating details about this hosting provider for many months without fully realizing what I had.
A broad variety of the latest firewall, spam filter and VPN appliances sold by Campbell, Calif. based Barracuda Networks Inc. contain undocumented backdoor accounts, the company disclosed today. Worse still, while the backdoor accounts are apparently set up so that they would only be accessible from Internet addresses assigned to Barracuda, they are in fact accessible to potentially hundreds of other companies and network owners.
Federal prosecutors are expected to announce today criminal charges against three men alleged to be responsible for creating and distributing the Gozi Trojan, an extremely sophisticated strain of malicious software that was sold to cyber crooks and was tailor-made to attack specific financial institutions targeted by each buyer.
Security experts in Poland on Thursday quietly seized domains used to control the “Virut” botnet, a huge army of hacked PCs that is custom-built to be rented out to cybercriminals.
