Top 10 Stories

There were 13 Point-of-Sale (PoS) malware signatures created in 2014, compared to three in 2013. According to the Dell SonicWALL Threat Research Team, the majority of these POS hits targeted the US retail industry as part of an evolution of POS malware tactics. “Malware targeting point-of-sale systems is evolving drastically, and new trends like memory scraping and the use of encryption to avoid detection from firewalls are on the rise,” said Patrick Sweeney, executive director...

The Chinese Government has been further accused of attacks against Government agencies, corporate companies and journalists across India and Southeast Asia over the past ten years. According to a report by FireEye, the attacks by APT 30 began in 2005 and the crucial evidence was given in an operating manual written in Chinese, a code base that was seemingly developed by Chinese developers, and a related domain registered to a suspicious ‘tea company’ in rural China. “Their targets possess...

The NSA has proposed a solution which it hopes will strike a balance between its desire to know everything about everyone and the average law-abiding citizen's right to privacy. According to The Washington Post the solution lies in a multi-part encryption key, created by various tech companies, which could unlock any device. NSA director Michael S. Rogers said at Princeton University that the key could be broken into several parts, meaning no one agency or company...

FireMon has announced the acquisition of Immediate Insight to add proactive network security intelligence and real-time security event analysis to its portfolio. Combining detailed network security intelligence with real-time security event analysis, the expanded capability will enable users to better identify gaps in their network security infrastructure, as well as triage any active compromise by automatically re-provisioning policies to prevent resulting attacks. FireMon plans to rapidly integrate the Immediate Insight team and technology into its...

Facebook has admitted that it does track users who do not have Facebook accounts, but it added that it was due to a bug that is currently being fixed. “The researchers did find a bug that may have sent cookies to some people when they weren't on Facebook. This was not our intention – a fix for this is already under way,” Richard Allan, Facebook's vice president of policy for Europe, wrote in response to...

Regulators in both the US and Europe are increasingly interested in what financial services companies are doing to address cyber security threats. According to Angus McFadyen of Pinsent Masons, after the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) announced its intention to introduce new regulations "strengthening cyber security standards for banks' third-party vendors" in the "coming weeks", Europe is to follow. The announcement was made as it revealed that fewer than half of the...

A group of hackers attacked the DEFRA website, and replaced its forecasts for air pollution over the British Isles with a message denouncing Britain’s involvement in the Iraq invasion of 2003. Saying: “It’s time to remind the British government what you did with Saddam Hussein will not forget” and featuring a portrait of the former Iraqi leader, the message also read: “And we are ready to sacrifice with everything, as not to give up iraq,...

Cyber criminals are trying to infect video games by hiding malware in new games.   According to Bitdefender, the Steam game service fell foul of fraudsters who created fake pages on the site in a bid to trick unsuspecting gamers into installing malware on their computers. The bad guys took a demo of a genuine new game, Octopus City Blues, and replicated its page on the “Greenlight” section of the Steam site.   The bogus...

A vulnerability in the kernel of Darwin, an open source component of both the OS X and iOS operating systems has been detected.   According to Kaspersky Lab security researchers, the vulnerability leaves OS X 10.10 and iOS 8 devices exposed to remotely-activated denial of service (DoS) attacks which can damage the user’s device and impact any corporate network to which it is connected. Devices affected include those with 64-bit processors and iOS 8: iPhone...

A survey of 1,336 industry professionals by Infosecurity Europe found that 62 per cent of participants claim to be able to detect a breach within seven days, yet two per cent said that it took at least a year.   Also, the survey found that 69 per cent of those who participated in the survey indicated that their organisation recognises the need to invest more in incident response and when asked about the greatest information...