MCYSEKA-Maritime Cyber Security Knowledge Archive

The best defense against a botnet is to get rid of it – to infiltrate it, to learn all about it, and to take it down. While the takedown is usually done by or with law enforcement and any necessary court orders, the initial infiltration, often by indiv…

As if malware weren’t becoming pervasive already, a new proof-of-concept has been developed by a team of researchers that takes over smart cards plugged into an infected computer’s USB port, putting them and all of the information contained on them in …

With advertisers still claiming that ‘do not track’ will destroy the free internet, and a European Commission proposal for privacy-by-design and by default – enforced by sanctions – ENISA has published ‘a technical perspective on behavioral tracking.’…

Browsers come ready-configured with their own start-up home page; but the default Opera home page (portal.opera.com) was compromised with an obfuscated redirect leading to the blackhole exploit kit.

Call it a hacking-as-a-service (HaaS): a group renting network server access for a variety of Fortune 500 companies, including Cisco Systems, is taking advantage of weak passwords to offer logins for cheap. Despite its discovery three weeks ago, the se…

No doubt eagerly awaited by online privacy experts, Google has updated its biennial Transparency Report, revealing that governments around the world made nearly 21,000 requests for access to Google data in the first six months of 2012 – a sharp increas…

On Tuesday a hacker calling himself ViruS_HimA and claiming to be Egyptian announced that he had hacked an Adobe server and dumped over 150,000 emails. Associated passwords were also leaked.

“On October 31, 2012, a NASA laptop and official NASA documents issued to a Headquarters employee were stolen from the employee’s locked vehicle,” says a 13 November email to all NASA employees. It warns that the laptop contains unencrypted personally …

Shining a major spotlight on the importance of privacy, Skype has addressed a major vulnerability that allowed hackers to take over any Skype account, armed only with the user’s e-mail address. The flaw was being actively exploited in the wild for thre…

While global cybersecurity attention tends to be placed on headline-grabbing exploits by hacktivists and cyber-espionage activities, there is a much less high-profile but no less dangerous threat festering: Online fraud rings, bent on identity theft.