So, we read that one or more hackers claim to have gained access to Mitt Romney’s tax records, reported first in a Nashville paper, then in the tech/business press. The hack allegedly took place at the Franklin office of PriceWaterhouseCoopers just outside of Nashville, and PWC has alleged that no such thing happened. We have

In May we read that game maker Blizzard, developer of a series of popular games including World of Warcraft, Diablo III and Starcraft, was hacked, but that turned out to just be individual compromised accounts from some of its users. Now we read, from Blizzard itself rather than a third party, that they have been

If your organization’s website runs on Apache, and many do, you might wonder if the webserver’s .htaccess controls are securely configured. If you believe the demo we saw yesterday at Blackhat by Matias Katz and Maximiliano Soler, the answer is a resounding ‘NO!’ What Katz and Soler described in their session is not some rare

Blackhat keynote speaker Shawn Henry, the former executive assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal, Cyber, Response and Service Branch, started off the day after opening remarks from Jeff Moss, founder of Blackhat. Moss wondered if now was the time for the cyber-security sector to take a more aggressive/offensive approach. Jeff mentioned working for a former

Evidence that criminals are targeting the computer systems of small businesses continues to mount. The Wall Street Journal recently drew attention to the way cybercriminals are sniffing out vulnerable firms. The article highlighted the fact that about 72% of the 855 data breaches world-wide last year that were analyzed in Verizon's Data Breach Investigation Report

Does the enterprise still have a choice about sharing information?

For the story behind the suspected industrial espionage, where ACAD/Medre.A was used, refer to Righard Zwienenberg's blog post. For technical details from analysing the worm's source code, read on. ACAD/Medre.A is a worm written in AutoLISP, a dialect of the LISP programming language used in AutoCAD. Whilst we classify it as a worm, due to

With the recent announcements of password breaches at LinkedIn, and warnings from Google about state-sponsored attacks on Gmail accounts, it seems like a good idea now to review some password security basics.  In this blog post, we’re going to take a look at a rather low-tech solution to a decidedly high-tech problem:  How to guard

In a recent survey of people in America who use their smartphone for work, less than a third said they employ the password protection on their smartphones. Although everyone will agree that not protecting your smartphone isn’t smart, it is all about memorizing.  Everyone that has an Android-based device knows they do not have to

SKYPE: Securely Keep Your Personal E-communications From time to time people get new computer equipment and need to (re-)install all their favorite programs. Often a painful and time-consuming job, but afterwards it should ease the way of working with the new equipment. Even security gurus have to undergo this procedure at regular intervals. In November