News

MWR InfoSecurity has just confirmed that an extra 100 people will be able to participate in this year's HackFu 2016 challenge. Players from all walks of life will be able to participate as remote delegates, providing support to those on the ground at HackFu, helping solve puzzles and solve clues to beat the challenges set out by MWR's tech boffins. Having previously incarcerated participants in a decommissioned prison, and converted a gothic mansion in Gloucestershire...

Join AppRiver's experts for another close-up on the findings of their Global Security Report. This week, we're analysing what the Distributed Spam Distraction Technique actually is and how it's developed over recent years. A cyber criminal basically uses stolen details to incur fraudulent charges - however the e-mail confirmation can't be hidden from the person being scammed. SO they will send this victim thousands of e-mails, which are very difficult to block, in order to...

I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll...bring your web application offline! The possibility of a business being targeted by some huge zombie army, or botnet, is enough to send shivers down the spine of many seasoned security veterans. Modern botnets are of vast size and power, with more sophisticated features and capabilities than ever before. Modern botnet attacks can be very precise and controlled, being pulsed and sent in different ways to make the attackers...

You are probably sick and tired of your IT team banging on about changing your passwords regularly, but there is no one to chase the IT team to change their own privileged passwords (admin, root and such). We assume they follow their own advice but ironically, the majority (55%) of IT professionals make end users change their passwords more often than they change administrative credentials. This is according to a survey of almost 200 IT professionals at...

Ransomware has been through a meteoric rise over the past 12 months. Going from a barely known form of malware to one of the most commonly deployed threats around, the criminal world appears to be fully incorporating ransomware into its business model. That's according to Palo Alto Networks, who've released a new report studying this form of attack. Considering 2016 has seen several institutions including hospitals being held hostage by ransomware, as well as through DDoS...

The IT Security Guru has been lucky enough to be able to share a series of videos from the security specialists at AppRiver, award winning e-mail and web security solutions providers. The videos will break down the findings from AppRiver's Global Security Report, a quarterly study published by the company that explains the latest trends and threat actors they've seen as they carry out their work, securing millions of inboxes around the world. This first...

Ask any top-level security bod and they'll tell you that they're sick and tired of their part of the company appearing at odds with the rest of it - despite their shared goals and incentives! So we took a seat with David Cramer, Vice President at BMC Software to get his take on why this seems a natural part of doing business today and what differences we can make in how we work and communicate to...

According to a study by Kaspersky Lab, people are still carelessly sharing private information over the Internet despite the consequences. 28 per cent of people share confidential data by accident, while 16 per cent willingly disclose secrets about themselves – despite the fact that information shared online can cost them a relationship or a job. The survey, which was conducted in co-operation with B2B International, questioned more than 12,000 people worldwide and found that many...

Despite the lengthy legal arguments, we now know that the FBI were able to hack into the San Bernadino shooter’s iPhone without Apple’s help. But that’s not to say the public debates were a waste of time – it was an opportunity for everyone to think clearly about where they stand on matters of privacy and national security. These issues aren’t going away any time soon, so it’s imperative that we take the discussions seriously....

Chris Pogue of Nuix has penned a whitepaper that argues that the security industry has been "fighting the wrong battle" using the wrong tools for 20 years. He cites the human vulnerability as the factor behind this assertion. “In the more than 2,500 data breaches I have investigated, I can count exactly zero that were caused by non-human-initiated system failure—like it or not, people are the problem,” said Pogue, Nuix’s Senior Vice President, Cyber Threat Analysis....