Editor's News

The Sony PlayStation online store was taken offline this morning, with visitors greeted with a message which read "Page Not Found! It's not you. It's the internet's fault".   According to media reports, the group "Lizard Squad" took credit for the outage, posting "PSN Login #offline #LizardSquad" on their Twitter account. This marks the second major instance of Lizard Squad hitting the gaming platform, after it previously hit it in August, while it also hit...

Following the leaking and publishing of 894 MB of data from Sony Pictures, employees and their families are now being threatened in an email message.   Last week, documents leaked through BitTorrent revealed names, home addresses, salaries (and bonuses), and social security numbers of thousands of staff, including executives. Now according to news360, the message said: “What we have done is so far is only a small part of our further plan”.   It claimed to...

Around three-quarters of internet-connected households in the UK are at risk of getting attacked through their wireless router.   According to a study conducted by Avast Software, more than half of all routers are poorly protected by default or common, easily hacked password combinations such as admin/admin or admin/password, or even admin/<no-password>.   The survey of more than 2,000 households in the UK found that 23 per cent of consumers use their address, name, phone...

A quarter of reported data breaches were caused by accidental loss or destruction of personal data.   According to a Freedom of Information Act request, an examination of incidents in the first three months of 2014 found one-quarter of reported data breaches were caused by the accidental loss or destruction of personal data, up 15 per cent for the second half of 2013.   Of these, between April and June 2013 and the same period...

Michael Fey has left the Intel Security Group to become chief operating officer at Blue Coat Systems.   A former manager within McAfee who remained with the company following the 2010 acquisition, Fey was chief technology officer within the newly formed Intel Security Group.   According to Reuters, Fey said that his role at Blue Coat would be "very similar" to his previous job, but now he is able to focus on the cloud and...

Microsoft will release seven security bulletins next week, three of which are rated as critical and are for Windows, Internet Explorer, Office and Exchange.   According to the advance notification, five of the fixes are for remote code execution flaws, while the others are for information disclosure and elevation of privilege. Russ Ernst, director of product management at Lumension, said: “If all seven are released as planned, the total number of patches in 2014 will...

Google has announced the deployment of an API to revamp the CAPTCHA model According to an announcement by Vinay Shet, product manager of reCAPTCHA at Google, it is easier to directly ask users whether or not they are robots and the radically simplified reCAPTCHA experience will allow users to confirm whether or not they are not a robot. Using artificial intelligence technology, Shet said this can solve even the most difficult variant of distorted text at...

A “major volumetric DDoS attack” caused significant downtime for DNSimple with traffic up to 25 GB per second and about 50 million packets per second. The attack on Monday on DNSimple was not directed at the website or any user, said founder Anthony Eden in a blog, who said that the traffic was sufficient enough to overwhelm the four DDoS devices it had placed in its data centres after a previous attack. He said that...

Analysis of the leaked Sony Pictures data has revealed poor security practices.   The analysis by Mashable found that password files were in the same folders that they were supposed to protect. One of the folders contained payroll spreadsheets, with details such as employees' names, job titles, home addresses and current salaries.   Some of the spreadsheet files were protected by a password but in the very same folder, there was a document called "passwords"...

The traditional penetration testing model is not effective any more, as the model is not balanced in terms of cost benefit and in ensuring flaws are fixed. Speaking at the Enterprise Security and Risk Management conference in London, Rui Shantilal, founder and managing partner of Keep-It-Secure-24, said that penetration testing has changed in the last ten years to match the actions of the attacker, but asked if enough was being delivered. He said that “frameworks,tools,...