Editor's News

Accuvant has announced that it is to be acquired by asset management firm Blackstone.   Blackstone will acquire a majority stake in Accuvant as part of their private equity portfolio, while Accuvant management and existing shareholder Sverica International LLC, a private equity investment firm, will invest alongside Blackstone in the transaction. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.   Accuvant is a provider of information security services and solutions serving enterprise-class organisations to help...

Future energy bills will rely on machine readable formats that is presented in a form that is clear and easy to understand.   According to the consultation on proposals to amend domestic energy supply licence conditions, which require provision of key energy data in a machine readable format, future energy bills and statements will require suppliers to place key customer energy data in a machine readable format on energy bills, such as in a QR...

The NSA set fire to the internet, and the rest of the world needs to be the fire fighter.   Speaking at the SXSW Conference in Austin, Texas, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said that the stories of the past eight months showed the “adversarial internet” and said that what he found and reported was “nothing which we asked for or wanted, but something we have to protect against”.   Snowden pointed the finger at two...

Encryption does work, is not an “arcane black art” and has improved since revelations of surveillance were made. Speaking at the SXSW Conference in Austin, Texas, NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden praised end-to-end encryption as it makes life harder for those who want to watch you and makes “mass surveillance impossible on a network level”. Snowden said that he had seen progress made as companies focusing on new user interfaces and ways to interact with...

More blackhats are being drawn to using The Onion Ring (TOR) to hide their online activity.   According to media reports, as well as being a great hiding mechanism for underground markets dealing in illegal items, TOR is also being used by cyber crooks to hide their criminal activities and infrastructure. According to Kaspersky Lab’s Sergey Lozhkin, its research found that there were approximately 900 hidden services online at any current time, and it found...

South Korea has suffered its second major data breach in three months, with a telecommunications company KT Corporation affected by the loss of 12 million customer records.   According to the Register, the South Korean Government has launched an inquiry into the breach. Despite two hackers and the CEO of a telemarketing firm being arrested last week on suspicion of infiltrating the telco giant’s servers and stealing the data, the South Korean telecoms ministry has...

Microsoft will release five patches next week, with two rated as critical.   The two critical patches both fix remote code execution flaws in Windows and Internet Explorer, while the three important-rated patches fix elevation of privilege and security feature bypass vulnerabilities in Windows and Silverlight.   Ross Barrett, senior manager of security engineering at Rapid7, said that this continues the light trend of 2014 patch Tuesdays. “We only see two issues that are critical/remote code...

Government investigation websites are often abandoned and filled with spam and malicious links as certificates expire and security updates lapse.   According to a blog by security researcher Terence Eden, abandonment is the primary cause of the vulnerabilities and, as time wears on, people begin to drift away from the project, jobs change and no one is left responsible for updating and maintaining the software.   “So we move on to the tragic fate of...

Online comic store ComiXology has warned of an unauthorised access of a database that contained user details, and rolled out a complete password reset.   In an email, ComiXology said that in the course of a recent review and upgrade of its security infrastructure, it determined that an “unauthorised individual accessed a database of ours that contained usernames, email addresses and cryptographically protected passwords”.   It said that even though it stores passwords in protected...

A free security app for mobiles has been introduced by Malwarebytes to protect people from the growing number of Potentially Unwanted Programs (PUPs) targeting Android users.   According to the company, the new version of Anti-Malware Mobile will give people an option to automatically detect and block the apps that aim to make money from aggressive advertising and in-app purchases, as well as collecting unnecessary amounts of personal data.   Claiming that such apps are...