This month’s Patch Tuesday will include seven security bulletins from Microsoft: four are critical and three are important; three require reboots, three may require a reboot, and one does not. Both businesses and consumers will likely be affected.
DARPA says goodbye to hacker-friendly Cyber Fast Track program
The Department of Defense is pulling the plug on Cyber Fast Track, a program aimed at tapping reformed hackers and other security hotshots to solve cyber-defense problems quickly.
Android malware blossoms as PC attacks fade
If there were any doubt that Android malware is becoming an epidemic, look no further than a study showing that the number of new malware programs for the mobile operating system has increased five-fold since the first half of 2012. PC threats, meanwhi…
RSA 2013: White Hats Need to Play a More Intelligent Game
The information security community must stop giving away the roadmap to its defense, said Art Gilliland, HP, at the RSA conference in San Francisco, February 28 2013.
Phase 3 of the Op Ababil DDoS attacks on US banks commences
al-Qassam Cyber Fighters announced the resumption on Tuesday. By Wednesday, customers of PNC Bank, Wells Fargo, Citibank, Bank of America and a number of other major banks were reporting difficulties to the sitedown.co website.
Raspberry Pi got DDoS’d
Starting late on Tuesday the Raspberry Pi Foundation was taken down by a massive SYN flood attack. The Foundation is behind the credit card-sized Raspberry Pi computer, originally designed to promote the teaching of computer basics in schools.
New botnet found in Latin America
A new botnet, AlbaBotnet, has been discovered in Latin America. It appears to be still in development and has not yet been used in anger. Currently it is designed to target two specific banks in Chile.
Oracle patches two Java zero-day exploits
Oracle has released an out-of-cycle emergency patch for Java to address two zero-day vulnerabilities, including a recently reported issue that allows hackers to download the McRAT remote access trojan. This is the fifth Java update so far in 2013.
Samsung Android devices vulnerable to lockscreen bypass
Hard on the heels of Apple iPhone lock screen bypass woes, it turns out that Samsung devices running Android version 4.1.2 have a similar bug, which allows someone to get around the screen lock.
Trolling – academics look at an online sub-culture that verges on bullying
A new study by Nottingham Trent University suggests that nearly 60% of online gamers have at some stage indulged in activity described by the university as ‘intentionally provoking or antagonizing users in an online environment’ – that is, trolling.