Top 10 Stories

Almost 20 per cent of corporate PCs are infected with some form of malware.   According to a report by Damballa and reported by Computing, there was no correlation between size and infection, with large organisations - which ought to have better resourced IT and computer security departments - seemingly no better protected than small and medium-sized businesses.   One of the key threats, it found, was organisations allowing contractors and other third parties full...

Infection rates of the latest Gameover Zeus malware variant "NewGoz" rose by 1,879 percent in July, despite efforts from law enforcement to shut down the criminal operation.   According to security firm Arbor Networks, after running a series of sinkholes against NewGOZ - a new variant – it saw the removal of the P2P command and control (C2) component in favour of a new domain generation algorithm (DGA).   V3 reported that the operation revealed...

Spying by the National Security Agency and increasing demands by the feds for client data continues costing U.S. IT giants billions in lost revenue.   According to Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) legislative analyst Mark Jaycox and reported by Venturebeat, based on NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden, successful agency programs likely continue despite the firestorm the disclosures created.   Jaycox pointed out that the fallout has instilled a climate of suspicion that has affected myriad...

Retailer Supervalu is investigating a potential data breach that may have resulted in the theft of account numbers and other numerical information from payment cards used at some point-of-sale systems at its stores.   The data breach appears to have taken place during the period of June 22 through July 17, said Reuters. The company also said it has notified federal law enforcement authorities and is cooperating in their efforts to investigate this intrusion. It...

As companies use virtual machines in operational environments, more malware is able to execute.   According to research by Symantec, most malware used to make a quick exit on virtual machines, but just 18 per cent of malware programs studied stop executing when a VM is detected, wrote Candid Wueest, a threat researcher, in a blog post Tuesday and reported PC World   One trick employed by malware to avoid being booted from a VM by...

Car company Tesla Motors recently attended the Def Con security conference in Las Vegas in order to hire hackers to develop security systems for its current and future vehicles.   According to Transport Evolved, Tesla sent its own security expert Kristin Paget along to try and recruit the best possible talent for Tesla. Paget herself is experienced in the field, having worked for Apple before her move to Tesla, and before that, Microsoft.   Paget told The...

Global users of password management service LastPass were left unable to access their online accounts for much of Tuesday after one of the firm’s data centers went down for several hours.   The outage occurred at 03.57 Eastern Time (8.57 BST), according to LastPass. At the time, LastPass urged users to login through browser extensions to access their vault, although even then it admitted that “some may still see warnings that they are in ‘offline...

The Chinese minority Uyghur have been relentlessly targeted.   According to Threatpost, a recent study published by researchers at Northeastern University in Boston and the National University of Singapore took an expansive look into targeted attacks against the World Uyghur Congress, a non-governmental organisation (NGO). They found that attackers go to great lengths to infiltrate their victims, tailoring phishing messages with precision in respect to the language and specialisation of the victim.   Emails are...

An ongoing cyber-espionage campaign which relies on the sophisticated Turla Trojan (also known as Snake, Uroboros and Carbon) appears to target the Governments and embassies of the former Eastern Bloc countries and has all the markings of a state-sponsored effort, reports Symantec.   According to Tech Week Europe, this campaign has compromised at least 84 legitimate websites to facilitate watering hole attacks since September 2012. Kaspersky Labs has dubbed the first stage of the infection mechanism ‘Epic’, adding that the...

Permissions in Google Play apps are “pretty greedy” according to research by Veracode.   Following fears about the permissions that Facebook Messenger requests, the company said that Messenger is hardly an outlier relative to the other social media apps on your phone. “Mobile apps need these permissions if you want them to function properly. Messenger is a feature-packed app; some of the others may not be. Asking for all those permissions doesn’t necessarily mean the...