Editor's News

Since the referendum results, Symantec's Threat Intelligence researchers have identified and blocked a 392% increase in spam e-mails that use Brexit in the subject line to target people and organisations via social engineering, a tactic that attackers use to get people to divulge sensitive information or install malware onto their computer.  Between the 9th of June and the 23rd of June, the number of e-mails detected and blocked by Symantec amongst our customer base was...

Kaspersky Lab’s latest report shows business travellers are more likely to be mugged of valuable private and corporate data than of their travel money, and yet their indiscriminate behaviour while online, particularly among senior executives, is playing into the hands of cybercriminals. One in five people have been a target of cybercrime while abroad, rising to almost a third (31 per cent) of senior business managers. At the same time, half of people travelling for...

LightCyber, a leading provider of Behavioural Attack Detection solutions, today announced the results of its Cyber Weapons Report 2016, a first-of-its-kind industry study which uncovers the top tools attackers use once they penetrate a network and work towards successfully conducting a data breach or other goals. The study found that 99 percent of post-intrusion cyberattack activities did not employ malware, but rather employed standard networking, IT administration and other tools. While malware was commonly used...

A study carried out by security management vendor FireMon at this month’s Infosecurity Europe in London has given brutally honest insight into the immense pressure cyber security professionals are under to carry out their jobs and meet outside regulations.  A staggering 28% admitted to compromising their ethics to pass audits, a figure that is up 6% from five years ago when the same question was posed in a similar survey.  This is likely due to...

On June 14, Imperva mitigated a 470 gigabits per second (Gbps) DDoS attack targeting a Chinese gambling company. The attack lasted for over four hours and it is without a doubt one of, if not the, largest assault on record to date. While the assault lacked the craftiness of DDoS threats Imperva has previously witnessed, it was significantly complex by network layer standards, relying on a mix of nine different payload (packet) types. Such nine-vector assaults are...

Two thirds of respondents to a global survey by the Business Continuity Institute claimed they had experienced at least one cyber incident during the previous twelve months, and 15% experienced at least ten incidents during the same period. The frequency of these cyber incidents demonstrates why it is important for organisations to have plans in place to mitigate against these kind of threats, or to lessen their impact.   The Cyber Resilience Report, the result of a study conducted by the BCI...

Back in the day, there were a few distinct, easily identifiable ransomware variants (Cryptolocker, Locky). Those were simpler times. Ransomware continues to behave similarly, but has evolved into a full ecosystem of threats to your network. This Cambrian explosion of ransomware makes it extremely difficult to recover from an attack: while it can be easy to realize that you’ve been compromised (all your files have been renamed with some weird extension and a scary text...

The urge to go online the moment they reach foreign soil sees a high proportion of people connecting to unsecured Wi-Fi networks, putting their personal data at risk, according to a study by Kaspersky Lab.  The research, which polled 11,850 people from across Europe, Russia, Latin America, Asia Pacific and the US, found that cybercrime is commonplace when abroad. However, as ever more essential travel information – from maps and hotel confirmations to check-in details...

New research from Norton by Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC) has revealed people in the UK are giving hackers access to their sensitive information like banking details and account passwords when connecting to public Wi-Fi networks. According to the Norton Wi-Fi Risk Report 2016, which surveyed over 9,000 people across nine markets, confusion about the security of public Wi-Fi networks can make people easy targets for hackers. Two in three are unable to recognise the difference between...

The number of users attacked with encryption ransomware is soaring, with 718,536 users hit between April 2015 and March 2016: an increase of 5.5 times compared to the same period in 2014-2015. The irreversible consequences of this kind of malware infection, along with the high value data that is being encrypted by ransomware, tempts victims to pay for decryption, which in turn draws more cybercriminals into the business. It’s no secret that crypto-ransomware, which encrypts...