Editor's News

Regin was spotted twice before yesterday's revelations, claim researchers. Following yesterday's announcement about the detection of the sophisticated surveillance backdoor Trojan ‘Regin’ by Symantec, researchers at both Kaspersky Lab and F-Secure have claimed that they were both aware of the threat. Kaspersky said in its research that it was contacted in spring 2012 by a researcher who mentioned Regin when analysis was being done of the Duqu malware. Kaspersky said that it has been tracking the threat for the...

Malware which has spied on international targets for more than six years has been detected. According to research from Symantec, “Regin” is a back door-type Trojan with a high degree of technical competence, including a powerful framework for mass surveillance. Its capabilities include several Remote Access Trojan (RAT) features, including: capturing screenshots, taking control of the mouse’s point-and-click functions, stealing passwords, monitoring network traffic, and recovering deleted files. “It is likely that its development took months,...

More effort needs to be put into apprenticeships and paid internships to boost recruitment opportunities. Speaking at the Cyber Security Summit in London, Judy Baker, chair and founder of the Cyber Security Challenge, said that the education system is not delivering for the industry, and challenged the industry to support careers fairs and pass information on about jobs as she hears from candidates that having entered a competition, they “finally get it”. She said: “Stretching...

After CryptoLocker and CryptoWall collected millions of dollars from its victims, warnings have been made that ransomware is proliferating through new attack vectors.   According to a report by Bromium, tactics such as malvertising, anti-analysis and persistence techniques to ensure system compromise are now being used, as well as advanced encryption algorithms.   Previously, a primary strength of crypto-ransomware was its ability to use well-known and reputable crypto libraries to perform encryption, and early families...

New functionality in the Citadel Trojan is specifically targeting password managers.   According to research by Dana Tamir, director of enterprise security at Trusteer, an IBM Company, said that while Citadel is not new, it is massively distributed and has compromised millions of computers worldwide.   She said: “IBM Trusteer research found that an average of 1 in 500 machines worldwide is infected with massively distributed APT malware at any point in time. Massively distributed malware has...

“if you are not on CISP, why not, get on CISP and encourage people to get on it.” Speaking at the Cyber Security Summit in London, CERT-UK head Chris Gibson admitted that he sometimes lays awake worrying about the impact of a national incident, but working with academia and industry means that the worrying time is reduced as it can assist companies when they need help. He said: “We are focused on building awareness and...

Security is moving beyond being built in or bolted on, to being more agile in a “built beyond” model. Speaking at the Cyber Security Summit in London, Mark Brown, executive director of cyber security and resilience at EY, said that trying to maintain 100 per cent security “is a false target” as a cyber criminal will take three, four or five minutes to buy malware which infects you, while businesses take three, four or five...

National and international initiatives will help cyber crime efforts both in prevention and talent. Speaking at the Cyber Security Summit in London, Francis Maude MP, minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General, said that cyber security remains a “shared responsibility” and while this is the sort of thing that politicians say, “nothing is more true than this subject”. He admitted that no one has all the answers and nor any Government around the world...

Speaking at the Cyber Security Summit in London, Jamie Saunders, director of the National Cyber Crime Unit at the National Crime Agency (NCA), called on greater cooperation between Government and business both nationally and internationally. Following the efforts involved with the Gameover Zeus and Shylock, the latter of which the NCA was directly leading on, Saunders said that it has proven that the UK can deal with cyber criminality. “GOZeus and Shylock proved that working...

Tens of thousands of infected devices have hit corporate networks across the world in a “next generation mobile threat”. The group behind the NotCompatible cyber crime group have evolved the sophistication of their malware to add proxy functionality that allows attackers to infiltrate secure enterprise networks via compromised devices. According to research from Lookout, new attributes to NotCompatible.C include resiliency to network-based blocking via a peer-to-peer protocol and multiple, geographically-distributed Command and Control servers; and a resistance...