Editor's News

Human error has been blamed in relation to an incident where digital certificates were signed that claimed to belong to the French administration. The French security agency said in a statement that an effort to “strengthen the overall IT security of the French Ministry of Finance” led to digital certificates being signed by the certification authority (CA) of the DGTrésor (Treasury) which is attached to the agency. It said: “The mistake has had no consequences...

Two million compromised accounts have been detected, including more than 1.5 million login credentials. According to a blog by Trustwave’s SpiderLabs, these were from data leaked from the Pony botnet controller and more than 318,000 were Facebook logins. Other login data related to Yahoo, Twitter and Gmail, as well as Russian social networks. In total there are users in 92 countries affected, indicating that the attack is fairly global and that at least some of...

A website which can tell users if their email address has been hacked and is used elsewhere has been launched. Created by security blogger and Microsoft MVP Troy Hunt, haveibeenpwned.com consolidates data from five major breaches that was revealed publicly and was readily available via various sites on the web: Stratfor; Adobe; Gawker; Yahoo; and Sony. Hunt said that collectively this is 154 million accounts, primarily being the 152 million + accounts breached from Adobe...

Hacker League, a platform for managing hackathons, has been acquired by Intel and will be formed into the Mashery division. According to a blog post by co-founder Mike Swift, Intel company Mashery has acquired the assets of Hacker League, just two years after the university project was built. “Since then, hackathon organisers in the US and abroad have listed and powered over 450 events on the platform creating a massive community of developers who now count on...

Around 140 command and control (C&C) domains have been taken down that apparently hosted the CryptoLocker ransomware. According to a blog by Malware Must Die, 138 domains have been suspended or sinkholed which hosted the rampant ransomware. “A Trojan Downloader is a type of virus that infects a computer like any other virus, but the key difference is that it is usually much smaller in size and does not carry the actual virus payload the...

Consider who comes into your office, and educate users to achieve the “human firewall”.   Speaking at an event in London, Peter Wood, CEO of penetration testers and consultancy First Base Technologies, said that users should be warned about locking workstations as “cleaners are never vetted” and servers are often accessed remotely as “IT people don’t like getting their knees dirty”.   He said: “An attacker can compromise a desktop and take control. The human...

Akamai has announced that it plans to acquire cloud-based security vendor Prolexic for $370 million (£226 million).   Adding cloud-based security solutions for protecting data centres and enterprise IP applications from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, the acquisition will see Akamai add these services to its web optimisation and security offerings once the definitive agreement is signed.   Akamai said that upon completion, it will be able to provide users with a portfolio of...

The CryptoLocker ransomware has shifted its focus away from consumers and small businesses to enterprises.   Speaking to IT Security Guru, Symantec security strategist Sian John said that in the last two weeks, enterprises had begun to see it getting blocked at the gateway and she expected that those who had been hit was due to “bad hygiene”.   She said: “It has hit a few enterprises and not only is this a big development,...

Research has showed that 41 per cent of IT professionals believe it is only a matter of time before there is a major cyber attack against the United Kingdom’s critical national infrastructure. The research, commissioned by RedSeal of 350 IT professionals and conducted by OnePoll, found that 17 per cent are simply not convinced it will not happen. Also, only 44 per cent of respondents said that they could sincerely say that their company is...

Kaspersky Lab has detected a banking Trojan that specifically targets online banking sites. It creators claim can that Neverquest can attack “any bank in any country” and several thousand attempts to infect computers used for online banking have been recorded. To date there have been posts made in hacker forums about buying and selling databases to access bank accounts and other documents, which are used to open and manage the accounts to which stolen funds...