Top 10 Stories

Researchers at Akamai have warned of a spate of DDoS being launched via Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) devices.   According to Akamai's Prolexic Security Engineering & Response Team (PLXsert), there has been a spike in reflection and amplification DDoS attacks since July which abuse the communications protocols that come enabled on UPnP devices, such as routers, webcams and printers.    The Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) is part of the UPnP protocol standard and...

The FBI has issued a private warning to industry that a group of highly skilled Chinese Government hackers was in the midst of a long-running campaign to steal data from US companies and Government agencies.   The advisory said: “These state-sponsored hackers are exceedingly stealthy and agile by comparison with the People’s Liberation Army Unit 61398 . . . whose activity was publicly disclosed and attributed by security researchers in February 2013.”   The FBI’s alert, obtained...

Four flaws in the OpenSSL cryptographic library are being fixed. With one flaw marked as low severity, and another two as medium severity, the most serious vulnerability is rated as a high risk, and could open the door to denial of service attacks, according to an OpenSSL project said in a recent advisory. In the most severe flaw, an attacker could send a specially crafted handshake message during the connection set-up, which prevents OpenSSL from freeing up...

A GCHQ spokesperson has welcomed the Government's steps to enhance national cyber security, but admitted that there is growing concern around critical infrastructure.   The spokesperson, who was not named under the Chatham House rule, denied recent suggestions that cyber terrorism is becoming reality but did admit that critical infrastructure and financial services requires focus, saying it was of ‘grave' concern on everything from brand reputation to the nation security as a whole.   He...

A highly advanced adversary is targeting major infrastructure companies with a zero-day exploit that has been unpatched since the spring.   According to Infosecurity, Hurricane Panda are striking on a daily basis, according to CrowdStrike, and the exploit affects all x64 Windows variants up to and including Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.   CrowdStrike discovered that the attacks begin with compromising web servers and deploying Chopper webshells, and then escalating privileges using the newly discovered...

More than four million UK employees have lost work-related data in the last 12 months due to corrupted and malfunctioning personal devices or cloud services. According to research by Kroll Ontrack, one in three (33 per cent or 10 million) UK employees, use personal devices or cloud services to store employer data. Yet without effective data usage guidelines, businesses risk losing control of their critical data and open themselves up to inefficiencies and potential legal...

Worldpay has launched a risk management tool to combat fraud and help online businesses operate more efficiently.   Named RiskGuardian, it was developed in partnership with ecommerce merchants across the globe and offers accurate risk checks to increase the acceptance of good transactions and minimise fraudulent ones. Running more than 200 checks per second on each transaction, it identifies emerging fraud patterns, meaning it can cut fraud losses by more than 50 per cent.  ...

A developer from Kansas has lost his job after created an Chrome extension and uploaded it, which allowed users to bypass the paywall on Kansas.com, the news website for the Wichita Eagle.   Despite the bypass working for two years, Chad Smith was only caught when he updated the extension after the Eagle upgraded its paywall and he updated the extension. The news website were concerned about the “enabling, sharing and promoting of theft from our company” and...

A coordinated operation involving Symantec, Cisco, FireEye, F-Secure, Microsoft and Tenable has seen protection created intended to severely dent the effectiveness of the Hikit backdoor malware.   Named Operation SMN, the cross-industry collaboration saw major security vendors share intelligence and resources to resulting in the creation of comprehensive, multi-vendor protection which may significantly blunt the effectiveness of this malware.   Symantec said that this is the first time that a significant effort to disrupt the...

A vulnerability in the Oregon Employment Department's WorkSource Oregon Management Information System may have led to the compromise of 851,322 data records.   Following an anonymous tip about the existence of the vulnerability, they reacted by taking down the system on Monday in order to patch it. The system is now back online, and has been "reinforced."   The department is now working with law enforcement officials to mount an investigation to see if the...