Bell Canada announced Sunday that “22,421 user names and passwords and 5 valid credit card numbers of Bell small-business customers were posted on the Internet this weekend.” It claims that it was not directly breached, but that the “posting results fr…
NSA/GCHQ Hacking Gets Personal: Belgian Cryptographer Targeted
Belgian newspaper De Standaard reported Saturday that the federal prosecutor is investigating the hacking of Jean-Jacques Quisquater, a renowned cryptographer and professor at the Université catholique de Louvain, close to Brussels. The hack was discov…
Sex and Violence: Teens’ Risky Online Behavior Increases Cyber-bullying
Most parents worry about their kids’ online behavior, especially as news of Facebook suicide campaigns, sexting and other alarming digital phenomena dominate the headlines.
Honey Encryption joins Honeywords and Honeypots in the Security Lexicon
‘Honey’ is the traditional term used to indicate a ‘decoy’ in computing. Two researchers have now used the epithet to describe their process of hiding a true key within a large number of false keys, making brute forcing stolen databases considerably mo…
Multi-platform Java Bot Provokes DDoS Floods
A new malicious Java application aimed at fomenting widespread distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks is making the rounds: a multi-platform bot capable of running on Windows, Mac OS and Linux.
Google sells Motorola to Lenovo
Patent stripping is a form of asset stripping – but less destructive. It seems to be what Google has done with Motorola. It bought Motorola for $12.5 billion in 2011, and announced an agreement yesterday to sell it to Lenovo for $2.91 billion – minus t…
SpyEye Trojan Author Pleads Guilty As Charged
The FBI announced yesterday that Aleksandr Andreevich Panin, aka ‘Gribodemon’ and ‘Harderman’ has pled guilty to charges accusing him of being the primary developer and distributor of the SpyEye banking trojan.
Mozilla Patches Thunderbird Remote Exploit Vulnerability
Mozilla Thunderbird, a free, open-source, cross-platform application for managing email and news feeds, has a critical validation and filter bypass vulnerability in version 17.0.6.
The Blackholing Side-effect of IP Reputation Filtering
A new report from a secure cloud hosting company shows that the effective use of IP reputation filtering creates an additional, or ‘blackhole’, layer of security. When probes from known attack sites return no response, the attackers don’t probe deeper,…
NSA and GCHQ Harvest User Data From Leaky Mobile Apps
Security experts have long warned that users should be more concerned about the sometimes excessive personal data that some apps take from their hosts. Now it seems that criminals and advertisers are not the only people interested in this information: …