Editor's News

Two-thirds of British businesses have been prompted to re-think their data protection strategy by 2014’s headlines.   According to a survey of 850 senior IT decision makers across Europe by Trend Micro, while 68 per cent are rethinking their data protection strategy, 24 per cent have not. Rik Ferguson, vice president security research at Trend Micro, said: “That businesses are being prompted by news coverage of big breaches suggests that the current penalties aren’t doing...

US hospital group Community Health Systems has said that it was the victim of a state-sponsored cyber attack and has seen 4.5 million patient records stolen.   Pointing the finger at China, Community Health Systems said that the hacking group known as "APT 18" were to blame, and may have links to the Chinese Government. In the attack, Social Security numbers and other personal data were taken, according to Reuters.   The personal data included...

Anthony J. Bettencourt has been named as the new President and CEO of Imperva.   With founder and current CEO Shlomo Kramer now serving at Chief Strategy Officer and continuing to serve as chairman of Imperva’s board of directors, Bettencourt was previously CEO of Coverity and serves on the boards of Proofpoint, Blinkx and Formation Data Systems.   Bettencourt said: “I am very pleased to be joining Imperva, and look forward to capitalising on the...

Following allegations that German Chancellor Angela Merkel was targeted by the NSA, new evidence has emerged which suggests that American politicians were recorded by German Intelligence.   According to CNN, Germany's intelligence service have intercepted phone calls made by the last two US secretaries of state – Hillary Clinton and current member John Kerry. German intelligence service BND apparently intercepted a phone call from Clinton "by chance" in 2012 while she was traveling on a...

Microsoft has pulled one of the patches it issued last week, saying MS14-045 can cause a “blue screen of death”.   In its update, Microsoft said that it is “investigating behaviour in which fonts do not render correctly” after any of the following updates are installed:   2982791 MS14-045: Description of the security update for kernel-mode drivers: August 12, 2014; 2970228 Update to support the new currency symbol for the Russian ruble in Windows; 2975719 August 2014 update...

American retailer Supervalu has said it has no evidence of any misuse of customer data, as it said it was investigating a potential data breach.   According to Reuters, Supervalu CEO Sam Duncan said in a statement: “I regret any inconvenience that this may cause our customers, but want to assure them that it is safe to shop in our stores.”   It suspected that the intrusion may have resulted in the theft of account...

A fake version of The Onion Router (Tor) website is distributing malware.   According to research, the website is an almost perfect copy of the original website, except for the download link, and also the donation one, replaced by a Bitcoin address. Downloading the software though includes an executable file named “torbrowser-install-3.6.3_en-US.exe", which is a .NET executable.   After some analysis and decryption, it was revealed that the command and control protocol runs on Tor. According to...

Mobile security firm Lookout has raised $150 million to expand its solution to large enterprises.   Previously a strong player in the consumer market, the company said it will use the $150 million round of financing to extend its reach to large enterprises through new product development and expanded go-to-market efforts.   Jim Dolce, CEO of Lookout, said: “The proliferation of mobile devices in the workplace has created a new set of security challenges for...

Speaking at the Def Con conference last week, academic Ryan Shapiro accused the FBI of avoiding compliance with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and “succeeding consistently fragrantly in violating the FOIA law”.   The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) model is one of the “most under-appreciated elements of US society and broken”, according to academic Ryan Shapiro.   Speaking at the Def Con conference last week, Shapiro accused the FBI of avoiding compliance with FOIA and...

The vulnerability which Stuxnet exploited remains unpatched on two-thirds of PCs running Windows XP.   According to research by Kaspersky Lab, despite the CVE-2010-2568 vulnerability being patched in June 2010, over a period of eight months between November 2013 and June 2014, its detection systems are still registering tens of millions of detections of CVE-2010-2568 exploits.   The majority of detections (64.19 per cent) were on XP, and 27.99 per cent were on Windows 7. “The large...