Just say noImage by Andy ArmstrongWhen ransomware locks down a computer or an entire system at your organization, what do you do? If you get an email from a hacker threatening a DDoS attack that will level your website, how do you respond?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
What will back up all the data on your smartphone, but doesn't physically exist? No, it's not another cloud backup service, it's the centerpiece of Toshiba Storage Peripherals' booth at IFA.The as-yet-unnamed (and unfinished) product will be about the size of a small plate, to judge by the prototype in a glass case on the booth. It will have a USB connection to charge your smartphone and back up its contents to an included 500 GB hard disk. There will be no cloud servers involved, and no internet connection needed: Everything will stay inside the device, said Toshiba's product manager for hard disks, Eun-Kyung Hong."This is for home backup where you know all your data is in your home, not in the cloud where you don't know whether it's secure or not," she said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you thought your smartphone was safe(r) from the wild west of malware, spyware and other viruses compared with the PC space, think again. A new report from Nokia proclaims a “sharp rise in the occurrence of smartphone malware infections” in the first half of 2016.
Taking the big hit are smartphone infections, which now account for 78% of all infections across the mobile network, says Nokia in its latest Nokia Threat Intelligence Report. The report is compiled by the company’s Threat Intelligence Lab, which aggregates anonymous data across global mobile networks using its Nokia NetGuard Endpoint Security product. Along with traffic monitor that detects malware command-and-control traffic and exploit attempts (among other attacks), the lab also keeps a database of the latest malware to analyze how attacks occur.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Recent data breaches underline the need for Internet users to regularly update the passwords for all their Internet accounts.On Wednesday, Spotify reset the passwords of an unspecified number of users, just a day after data on 68 million accounts from Dropbox began reaching the Internet.In a notice to users, Spotify said their credentials may have been compromised in a leak involving another service, if they used the same password for both.“Spotify has not experienced a security breach and our user records are secure,” the company said in an email. The password reset is merely a precaution, it said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Top mid-market software productsG2 Crowd, an online platform hosting more than 100,000 user reviews, has shared its list of top mid-market software products as rated by users of such tools based on how much they like the software and would recommend it to others. While you might be familiar with some of the products on this list, you won’t find much in the way from the highest profile software companies, such as Microsoft and Salesforce.com. “Like the majority of smaller organizations, mid-market companies [51 to 1,000 employees] require software products that are sophisticated but not too pricey, and also easy to use,” says Michael Fauscette, chief research officer at G2 Crowd.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A 17.5 foot long, 5.5 foot wide and 1.5 foot tall the 3D printed aircraft design tool has earned the title of largest solid 3D printed item by Guinness World Records.The 1,650 lb. apparatus known as a trim-and-drill tool is comparable in length to a large sport utility vehicle and will ultimately be tested for use in building the Boeing 777X passenger jet. Basically the tool will be used to secure the jet’s composite wing skin for drilling and machining before assembly according to researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ONRL) who developed the tool.+More on Network World: The hottest 3D printing projects+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Department of Defense needs to move past open source myths that have been debunked and jump on the open source bandwagon or the DoD and U.S. military will not be able to maintain tech superiority, warns a Center for a New American Security (CNAS) report.To maintain technological superiority, the DoD needs “to acquire, develop, deploy, and maintain cutting-edge software” systems. “Unless the department is able to accelerate how it procures, builds, and delivers software, it will be left behind,” said the authors of “Open Source Software and the Department of Defense” (pdf).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Adobe Systems released critical security patches for its ColdFusion application server, which has been a target for hackers in the past.The updates are available for ColdFusion versions 10 and 11 and address a critical security vulnerability that could lead to sensitive information disclosure when parsing specially crafted XML entities.Administrators are advised to upgrade their ColdFusion deployments to version 10 update 21 or version 11 update 10, depending on which branch they're using. The ColdFusion 2016 release is not affected, Adobe said in a security advisory.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
SentinelOne Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) is an antimalware solution that protects against targeted attacks, malware, and zero-day threats through behavioral analysis and process whitelisting and blacklisting. The client agent, which analyzes the behavior of processes on Windows, OS X, Linux, and Android endpoints, can replace or run alongside other signature-based antimalware solutions. SentinelOne EPP stands out not only for its protection capabilities but also for its excellent forensics and threat analysis.SentinelOne evaluates process behavior based on "dynamic execution patterns." The agent scans endpoints, indexes application files and processes, and sends information about them to the cloud where they are assigned reputation scores. When scores surpass policy thresholds, processes can be killed, files quarantined, and endpoints rolled back to the last known-good state. Metadata about processes and files are pooled among SentinelOne's customers, building an anonymous threat intelligence network that benefits everyone.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
It has not been a good few months for the health and consistency of airline information technology. Two huge outages within a couple of weeks of each other -- caused by simple component failures -- resulted in massive passenger disruptions and cost two U.S. airlines millions of dollars in lost revenue and customer compensation.These events, while of course most painful for those who experienced them, present quite a few opportunities for learning and improving our own processes, and that's what I'd like to explore in this piece.[ Further reading: Backup and recovery tools: Users identify the good, bad and ugly ]
First, a little background. What ended up being a faulty router took down the entire Southwest Airlines operation for a day on July 21 and caused rippling effects for several days after the original outage. (A fact that might surprise you is that Southwest is by a wide margin the largest domestic carrier of passengers in the United States.) The Dallas Morning News reported the fallout.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Perhaps the worst news about Pokemon Go is how attackers are using it to spread malware. This is not the first time bad-guy hackers have leveraged the popularity of games to spread malicious software. Viral memes spread malware, too, via drive-by attacks as people visit malicious sites that draw them by hosting or linking to the internet-based cultural sensation.Users assume that games and meme sites have integrity. This makes it easy for the hackers to push compromising software onto consumers’ phones and computers and into your organization. Cyber thugs also use man-in-the-middle attacks on game apps to take control of mobile devices and launch attacks on the enterprise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dropbox’s move last week to ask users who had signed up before mid-2012 to change their account passwords followed the discovery of a large dump of email addresses and passwords related to these accounts.The online storage company confirmed late Tuesday reports that 68 million user email addresses and hashed and salted passwords from an incident in 2012 had been compromised.Dropbox said that the password reset the company completed last week covered all of the affected users so that the Dropbox accounts are protected.Last week, the company asked users who signed up before mid-2012 to change their passwords if they haven’t done so since then, describing it as a preventive measure and not because there was any indication that their accounts were improperly accessed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dropbox’s move last week to ask users who had signed up before mid-2012 to change their account passwords followed the discovery of a large dump of email addresses and passwords related to these accounts.
The online storage company confirmed late Tuesday reports that 68 million user email addresses and hashed and salted passwords from an incident in 2012 had been compromised.
Dropbox said that the password reset the company completed last week covered all of the affected users so that the Dropbox accounts are protected.
Last week, the company asked users who signed up before mid-2012 to change their passwords if they haven’t done so since then, describing it as a preventive measure and not because there was any indication that their accounts were improperly accessed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Okta has changed key parts of its product portfolio to attract new users to its corporate identity management and access control platforms. The startup is launching a new API access management product and revamping its provisioning service to make it easier to change employees' permissions within a company.The changes, announced at the company's Oktane conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, were designed to give Okta more ammunition against a growing field of identity-management rivals, including Microsoft and OneLogin.Okta API Access Management builds on Okta's existing tools for developers who manage application logins. It lets administrators control how users of those apps access business systems that are surfaced through APIs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A popular BitTorrent client called Transmission has again been found distributing Mac-based malware, months after it was used to spread a strand of ransomware.Researchers at security firm ESET have been following a malware called OSX/Keydnap, which can steal passwords, and noticed that it was spreading through Transmission’s official site.Somehow, a version of the BitTorrent client containing the malware had been recently made available on the site, ESET said in a blog post on Tuesday.Transmission has already removed the download, according to ESET. But users who downloaded the client between this past Sunday and Monday should check for signs that their Mac has been comprised.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Identity management vendor Okta and Google have announced a partnership aimed at getting enterprises to secure their users' identities in the cloud.
As part of the deal, Google will use Okta as its preferred identity provider for Google Apps enterprise customers. Businesses that buy a ton of Apps for Work licenses will also be encouraged to use Okta's services to manage how their users connect to business apps.
Okta's identity management product makes it possible for companies to create one central directory of employees, who can then use a single set of credentials to get into business software that they need to use. That includes Google Apps and a variety of other services like Salesforce, Yammer, and ServiceNow. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Security researchers have highlighted in recent months how the web proxy configuration in browsers and operating systems can be abused to steal sensitive user data. It seems that attackers are catching on.A new attack spotted and analyzed by malware researchers from Microsoft uses Word documents with malicious code that doesn't install traditional malware, but instead configures browsers to use a web proxy controlled by attackers.In addition to deploying rogue proxy settings, the attack also installs a self-signed root certificate on the system so that attackers can snoop on encrypted HTTPS traffic as it passes through their proxy servers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hopefully you were not curious about why McChicken was trending on Twitter. If you checked it out and saw the graphic video of a man engaging in a sexual act with the McDonald’s sandwich, then you might have wished for a miracle cure to unsee it. @geraldtbh
But Twitter was not the only place McChicken was trending; it was also trending on Facebook because it was going viral.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A destructive ransomware program deletes files from web servers and asks administrators for money to return them, though it's not clear if attackers can actually deliver on this promise.Dubbed FairWare, the malicious program is not the first ransomware threat to target Linux-based web servers but is the first to delete files. Another program called Linux.Encoder first appeared in November and encrypted files, but did so poorly, allowing researchers to create recovery tools.After attackers hack a web server and deploy FairWare, the ransomware deletes the entire web folder and then asks for two bitcoins (around US$1,150) to restore them, Lawrence Abrams, the founder of tech support forum BleepingComputer.com, said in a blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
What you need to knowOrganizations are quickly learning that keeping the bad guys out of an enterprise environment isn’t as simple as deploying firewalls and antivirus. As cybercriminals utilize customized malware and bypass traditional antivirus solutions, it’s become necessary to take a broader and more proactive approach to protect the endpoint. This means real-time monitoring, detection and advanced threat analysis coupled with response technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here