Understanding how to buy bitcoins and pay ransomware authors for decryption keys is hard enough, yet some cybercriminals now expect their victims to do it in under an hour if they want all of their files back.A new ransomware program dubbed Jigsaw encrypts users' files and then begins to progressively delete them until the victim pays the equivalent of $150 in Bitcoin cryptocurrency.The ransomware deletes one file after the first hour has passed and then increases the number of files it deletes in every 60-minutes cycle. If no payment has been made within 72 hours, all remaining files will be deleted.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 6 simple tricks for protecting your passwords
"Try anything funny and the computer has several safety measures to delete your files," the program's creators warn in their ransom message that's accompanied by a picture of the Jigsaw killer's mask from the horror film series Saw.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Faced with few options, companies are increasingly giving in to cybercriminals who hold their data hostage and demand payment for its return, while law enforcement officials struggle to catch the nearly invisible perpetrators.The risks to organizations have become so severe that many simply pay their attackers to make them go away -- a strategy that may only embolden the crooks.It's a case of asymmetric electronic warfare. Ransomware, which encrypts files until a victim pays to have them unlocked, can be devastating to an organization. Barring an up-to-date backup, little can be done aside from paying the attackers to provide the decryption keys.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft is throwing its weight behind the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield agreement, which is intended to safeguard the privacy of European Union citizens when their personal information is exported to the U.S. for processing.But a document leaked late last week suggests the proposed agreement does not have the backing of EU data protection authorities, who are meeting this week to finalize their position on it.Microsoft will seek approval to conduct data transfers under the agreement, its Vice President for EU Government Affairs, John Frank, wrote in a blog post Monday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Adobe is working on an emergency patch for its Flash Player after attackers are reportedly exploiting a critical flaw.
The vulnerability, CVE-2016-1019, affects Flash Player version 21.0.0.197 on Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS, according to an advisory published on Tuesday.
The flaw is being actively exploited on Windows XP and 7 systems running Flash Player versions 20.0.0.306 and earlier.
"Successful exploitation could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system," it said.
A patch could be released as soon as Thursday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
DARPA this month will explain what it wants in the next development phase of its reusable Mach 10 satellite taxi capable of carrying and deploying a 3,000- 5,000 lb. satellite into low earth orbit (LEO) at a target cost of less than $5M per launch.+More on Network World: DARPA: Show us how to weaponize benign technologies+DARPA’s Experimental Spaceplane (XS-1) system would have a reusable first stage that would fly to hypersonic speeds at a suborbital altitude. At that point, one or more expendable upper stages would separate and deploy a satellite LEO. The reusable first stage would then return to earth, land and be prepared for the next flight. Modular components, durable thermal protection systems and automatic launch, flight and recovery systems should significantly reduce logistical needs, enabling rapid turnaround between flights.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Security experts have devised a method that allows users to recover data from computers infected with the Petya ransomware program without paying money to cybercriminals.Petya appeared on researchers' radar last month when criminals distributed it to companies through spam emails that masqueraded as job applications. It stood out from other file-encrypting ransomware programs because it overwrites a hard disk drive's master boot record (MBR), leaving infected computers unable to boot into the operating system.The program replaces the drive's legitimate MBR code, which normally starts the operating system, with code that encrypts the master file table (MFT) and shows a ransom note. The MFT is a special file on NTFS volumes that contains information about all other files: their name, size and mapping to hard disk sectors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There’s nothing particularly new about new products being shipped with malware, but if you are in the market for surveillance cameras and are looking for a good deal, then a security researcher warned that even products sold on Amazon come with embedded malware.Security researcher Mike Olsen found a decent deal on an outdoor surveillance CCTV setup, specifically six Sony HD IP cameras and recording equipment which are being sold on Amazon by a seller with “great ratings.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Talk of blockchain technology is everywhere, it seems -- but what is it, and what does it do?1. Don't call it "the" blockchainThe first thing to know about the blockchain is, there isn't one: there are many. Blockchains are distributed, tamper-proof public ledgers of transactions. The most well-known is the record of bitcoin transactions, but in addition to tracking cryptocurrencies, blockchains are being used to record loans, stock transfers, contracts, healthcare data and even votes.2. Security, transparency: the network's run by usThere's no central authority in a blockchain system: Participating computers exchange transactions for inclusion in the ledger they share over a peer-to-peer network. Each node in the chain keeps a copy of the ledger, and can trust others’ copies of it because of the way they are signed. Periodically, they wrap up the latest transactions in a new block of data to be added to the chain. Alongside the transaction data, each block contains a computational "hash" of itself and of the previous block in the chain.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Website hosting platform Wordpress.com will automatically enable HTTPS for all the custom domain names that its users have associated with their websites.Run by Automattic, WordPress.com allows users to easily create and manage websites based on the hugely popular WordPress content management system. Users of the free service get a subdomain under wordpress.com to use as an address for their website, but paid plans allow hosting a custom domain.Implementing HTTPS for wordpress.com subdomains was fairly easy and Automattic did this in 2014. However, turning on encryption for hosted websites with custom domain names requires individual certificates for each of those domains, which posed management and cost-related problems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Open Source Vulnerability Database shut down this week posed yet another security challenge for developers who routinely inject massive amounts of free off-the-shelf code into new software.As the name suggests, OSVD was a resource where non-commercial developers could look – free - for patches to known vulnerabilities.+More on Network World: 10 best cloud SLA practices+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow. ClearSlide for Gmail Key features: Available to all ClearSlide users, ClearSlide for Gmail is an easy-to-install Google Chrome app that is designed to increase salesperson productivity and improve the quality of CRM data by automatically logging all outbound emails, prospect views, and content engagement directly back to Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Where is IoT going in the long run?... To cash in on the treasure trove of “everything it knows about you,” data collected over the long term, at least it is according to a post on Medium about the “dirty little secret” of the Internet of Things.A company can only sell so many devices, but still needs to make money, so the article suggests the “sinister” reason why companies “want to internet-connect your entire house” is to collect every little bit of data about you and turn it into profit. Although the post was likely inspired in part by the continued fallout of Nest’s decision to brick Revolv hubs, there could a IoT company eventually looking for a way to monetize on “if you listen to music while having sex.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Buildings were evacuated at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, on Friday afternoon after a threat was made against the company.No one was injured and there was no damage to buildings, Mountain View police spokeswoman Katie Nelson said. The incident involved a few buildings, beginning around 3:30 p.m. and concluded shortly before 5 p.m. Both police and Google security responded.Google didn't immediately have more information to provide. Police didn't comment on the nature of the threat and said they responded out of caution.While the campuses of Silicon Valley companies aren’t normally considered terrorist targets on the scale of federal buildings or major sporting events, major companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook are prominent symbols of U.S. economic and cultural power.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A proposal from two senior U.S. senators would force tech companies to give technical assistance to law enforcement agencies trying to break into smartphones and other encrypted devices.The draft bill, released Friday by Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein, would allow judges to order tech companies to comply with requests from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to help them break into devices. Burr, a North Carolina Republican, is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee; Feinstein, from California, is the panel's senior Democrat."All persons receiving an authorized judicial order for information or data must provide, in a timely manner, responsive, intelligible information or data, or appropriate technical assistance," the draft bill says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices. Click here to subscribe. If you happen to be driving around California roads this summer, don't be surprised if a car with no driver pulls up next to you at an intersection. Google expects to be road-testing its prototype of a driverless car soon. If all goes well with this and other tests, BI Intelligence believes there could be 10 million cars with self-driving features on our roads by 2020.Fully autonomous cars – those that don't need any interaction at all from a driver, like Google's – still seem futuristic to most of us, but there are plenty of semi-autonomous cars sharing our roads today. This latter category includes all sorts of features to increase safety and convenience, everything from lane-keeping assist systems designed to keep a car in an open lane, to adaptive cruise control that matches the car's speed to that of the vehicle ahead,To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Getting and enforcing a service level agreement is paramount when employing cloud services – that was the chief conclusion reached in a report out this week by the federal watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office.“Purchasing IT services through a provider enables agencies to avoid paying for all the assets such as hardware, software and networks that would typically be needed to provide such services.+More on Network World: What network technology is going to shake up your WAN?+This approach offers federal agencies a means to buy the services faster and possibly cheaper than through the traditional methods they have used. To take advantage of these potential benefits, agencies have reported that they plan to spend more than $2 billion on cloud computing services in fiscal year 2016,” the GAO stated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Over the past two and a half years, cybercriminals have managed to steal over $2.3 billion from thousands of companies worldwide by using little more than carefully crafted scam emails.Known as business email compromise (BEC), CEO fraud or whaling, this type of attack involves criminals impersonating an organization's chief executive officer, or some other high-ranking manager, and instructing employees via email to initiate rogue wire transfers.According to an alert issued earlier this week by the FBI, between October 2013 and February 2016, 17,642 organizations from the U.S. and 79 other countries have fallen victim to BEC attacks. The combined losses amount to over $2.3 billion, the agency said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In early February, a thief broke into several offices in Olympia, Washington to steal anything he could grab that was worth selling. In one locked drawer, the thief found a couple of external hard drives that he added to his haul of cash, cameras, electronics and laptops.The hard drives belonged to the local office of the Administration for Children and Families, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, and contained between two and five million records related to child-support audits.As of Thursday morning, the City of Olympia police department did not know what happened to the drives, even though two people have been arrested in connection with the theft.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Adobe Systems released a security update for Flash Player to fix 24 critical vulnerabilities, including one that hackers have been exploiting to infect computers with ransomware over the past week.The company advised users Thursday to upgrade to the newly released Flash Player 21.0.0.213 on Windows and Mac and Flash Player 11.2.202.616 on Linux. The Flash Player Extended Support Release was also updated to version 18.0.0.343.As usual, the Flash Player build bundled with Google Chrome on all platforms, Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer for Windows 10 and IE for Windows 8.1 will be upgraded automatically through the update mechanisms of those browsers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An open-source project dedicated to cataloguing a huge range of computer security flaws has closed its doors as of Tuesday, according to an announcement on the Open-Source Vulnerability Database’s blog.The OSVDB, which was founded in 2002, was meant to be an independent repository for security information, allowing researchers to compare notes without oversight from large corporate software companies.One of its founders was HD Moore, a well-known hacker and security researcher, best known for his development of the Metasploit framework, a software suite widely used for penetration testing. Moore recently left security firm Rapid7 for a forthcoming venture capital firm that will focus on infosec startups.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here