Editor's News

More use of encryption and specifically on the chip in mobile devices is making forensic analysis even harder. Speaking at the (ISC)2 EMEA Congress in London, Mark Stokes, head of digital and electronic forensic services at the Metropolitan Police, said that there is a need for “good intuitive tools that are easy to learn” and while some investigators can learn in the morning and investigate in the afternoon to make a decision on to charge...

The majority of IT security executives understand the risk created by misused or stolen credentials, but only a third are confident of their organisation’s ability to detect improper access.   According to a survey of 35,400 executives by Courion, 97 per cent were aware of the risk, but only 29 per cent were confident in their own organisations ability to effectively remediate those access risks.   It found that 72 per cent of respondents were...

The biggest challenge to security is people, as security people and employees are not teaching or learning the basics.   Speaking on a panel at the (ISC)2 EMEA Congress in London, Ray Stanton, executive vice president of global services at BT, referred to recent research which found that 93 per cent of breaches were due to human error, and 43 per cent were down to sending email to the wrong people, and he asked why...

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...