Medical devices could be cyber underground’s next juicy target
April 29, 2010
As the cybercrime underground continues to advance, criminals inevitably will continue to seek out fragile technologies being used to manage valuable digital assets. In this LastWatchdog guest blog post, Kurt Stammberger, vice president of marketing at device security vendor Mocana, makes the case that medical devices and systems are ripe for attack. Stammberger helped launch cryptography startup RSA and their spin-off company VeriSign, and was …More
Lumension advocates ‘intelligent whitelisting’ as a superior defense
April 28, 2010
McAfee’s recent error blacklisting a core Windows operating system program triggered the shut down of corporate systems worldwide, requiring manual cleanup of thousands of workplace PCs. That incident helps support the viability of a new approach security vendor Lumension has recently begun advocating, called ‘intelligent whitelisting.”
Intelligent whitelisting works by scanning an entire network for malicious programs, then cleaning up any infections. Lumension then takes a snapshot …More
RSA study confirms young adults’ engage in risky online behaviors
April 28, 2010
Most young people aren’t too worried about privacy and security when using the Internet. They could come to regret this attitude later in life.
Those common-sense notions are now supported by an extensive TRU Research report commissioned by RSA, the security division of EMC. Despite the steadily rising risk of being victimized by thieves and scammers on the Internet, young adults by and large conduct themselves online …More
Botnets + hacking kits + Web app holes = good times for cybercriminals
April 28, 2010
Criminal-controlled botnets are becoming more resilient and powerful than ever. It’s easier than ever for even low-skilled hackers to supply botnets with freshly infected PCs via user-friendly hacking tool kits. And many of them are using these tool kits to spread infections on weakly protected web pages put up by legitimate corporations.
Those are conclusions from recent security reports from Symantec’s MessageLabs division, Microsoft, M86 Security, WhiteHat Security and Imperva.
Botnet-driven click fraud attacks pilfering millions from advertisers
April 23, 2010
The clever hacking of online advertisements has quietly grown into a multi-million dollar criminal industry showing no signs of slowing.
The big losers: online advertisers.
One of the fastest growing forms of this type of thievery is click fraud, specifically bot-net generated click fraud. To understand what a lucrative endeavor this has become requires a basic grasp of how “contextual” advertising — ads that chase certain keywords — appear alongside …More
McAfee error triggers massive manual PC clean-up
April 22, 2010
News reports suggest thousands of Windows PCs in large organizations around the globe were thrown into a fit of rebooting yesterday after McAfee distributed a routine antivirus update carrying an egregious error.
Now each one of those computers will have to be manually cleaned. Affected organizations can expect to expend a minimum of 30 minutes of manual labor per PC to get each one back into …More
Google faces profound liability concerns over Gaia password breach
April 21, 2010
If hackers earlier this year truly absconded with the detailed software coding that undergirds Google’s Gaia password system, as reported by the New York Times this week, the search giant could be facing complex security and liability issues for some time to come, security and tech industry analysts say.
“Google now has an incalculable liability to all its users and business, government and foreign government customers whose personal information and secrets have been made available to who knows …More
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