Editor's News

The House of Commons Treasury Select Committee has held a series of high-level meetings with financial regulators and other experts on cyber crime to address concerns of a major attack. According to the Telegraph, the meetings have been held with an influential group of MPs investigating whether the financial system is at serious risk of cyber security breaches, amid growing concerns that customers and businesses are inadequately protected. Among the concerns are: while banks are investing...

Around 190,000 mobile phones are found in the back of London's taxis every year. Research by ESET of 300 London taxi drivers found that the average taxi driver finds eight mobile phones in the back of their cab every year, and with 24,000 black cabs in London, this equates to 190,000 devices. The survey also found that half of the devices found in taxis are completely unlocked, while two-thirds (68 per cent) admitted that they would...

A new version of the Cryptowall ransomware may be about to hit businesses and consumers, with suspicion that the first version was just a test.   According to research by F-Secure, the first samples of ransomware calling itself "CryptoWall 2.0" were spotted in the wild. It said that CryptoWall 2.0 appears to use a new packer/obfuscator with an increased amount of anti-debugging and anti-static analysis tricks. However upon infection, CryptoWall 2.0’s payload is almost identical to the samples seen...

A botnet has reportedly enslaved 17,000 endpoints and has used a Reddit server as its command and control (C&C) server.   According to a discussion, the Mac.BackDoor.iWorm malware has snared PCs and Macs into the botnet. It is capable of discovering what other software is installed on the machine, opening a port on it, and sending a query to a web server to acquire the addresses of the C&C servers, reported Net Security.   According to research...

JP Morgan Chase has admitted that a breach that it suffered in August may affect up to 76 million households and seven million small businesses. The breach saw user contact information, such as names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses, as well as internal JPMorgan Chase information relating to such users, compromised. In a securities filing issued yesterday, the firm said that there is no evidence that bank account information for such affected customers was compromised during this attack, and it...

Kaspersky Lab has announced its move into the DDoS (distributed-denial-of-service) space.   Offering a solution designed to protect online services, the Kaspersky DDoS Protection software can be altered in response to the way the attacks are carried out and businesses can adjust and modify the detection and filters to the threat landscape.   The European built and tested solution can filter most of the traffic involved in attacks on the provider’s side, but only if...

The safe and secure sharing of medical research data has been enabled due to a secure infrastructure for collaboration and the sharing of resources for data science.   The research and education network Janet, provided by Jisc, can offer additional controls and safeguards for researchers working with sensitive data.   Jisc said that it is working with leading UK universities to support three new initiatives: the development of the Farr Institute of Health Informatics Research, a...

Europe “needs to be far more ambitious” in the cyber security threat field. Speaking at the ENISA (EU's Agency for network and information security) event in Brussels to mark the first day of the global Cyber Security Awareness Month, Neelie Kroes, vice president of the European Commission and commissioner for the Digital Agenda, Kroes said that both the public and private sectors need to improve, saying that we cannot wait for “something to happen which...

Almost ten per cent of UK businesses are unaware if they have suffered a data breach in the past 12 months, while almost a quarter have not detected any security breaches in the past year. According to the latest Global State of Information Security report by PwC, which interviewed 9,805 executives from more than 154 countries, 69 per cent of companies experienced a security incident in the UK in the past 12 months, while the...

A survey of 300 UK IT directors and managers by Cyber Security EXPO found that more than a third (37 per cent) were most concerned about a shortage of security technology, compared to nine per cent who cited lack of budget as the most significant challenge. Almost a quarter (23 per cent) claimed the biggest challenge was the shortage of well-qualified people. Asked if it was a surprise that professionals were bemoaning a lack of...