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
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
News of SMS (text) phishing scams are nothing new to readers of this blog. ESET researcher Cameron Camp recently wrote an article explaining how they work and how to avoid them here on ESET’s Threat Blog: SMSmishing (SMS Text Phishing) – how to spot and avoid scams, And just before Valentine’s Day, my colleague Stephen
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
Day two of the show, and we ask vendors and participants what the pain points are for Small and Medium Businesses (SMB), especially in the category from 25 to 250 member organizations, even narrowing that to 100 employees or less. It seems this sector is largely missed by the large vendors on the show floor
Computer security is not created, nor is it improved, by calling people stupid. That's the conclusion I have arrived at after more than two decades in computer security and auditing. To put it another way, we should stop dropping the "S" bomb, especially when it comes to people who don't know any better. Consider the
So you browse your favorite restaurant review site and settle on a great Mediterranean restaurant, and “magically” a variety of preferences get fed back to your Facebook profile, to be shared, re-shared and re-shared, ricocheting around the internet to form purportedly value-added experiences elsewhere you visit. That’s great news if you want your preferences bounced
Do you know what your children are doing online, and do they know the risks out there?
Awhile back we noted a case where Ramona Fricosu, a woman accused of involvement in a mortgage scam, was asked, following a law enforcement raid in which her laptop was seized, to decrypt data on the device for use as evidence, potentially incriminating her. She pleaded the 5th Amendment protection against self-incrimination and refused to
In an escalation of the tendency to require companies to be forthright with their users following a breach, a European Union proposed bill intended to overhaul a 17-year old law is making progress. This week EU will outline the overhaul to the existing rules, hoping to encourage more expedient communication efforts following a breach, in
We've noted the often staggering fees associated with a credit card breach, normally accompanied by a slew of bad press. We've seen Stratfor, in light of their recent hack, dealing with public exposure issues due, in part, to unencrypted payment card information (for which, to their credt, they’ve publicly apologized for). Now we see a
Okay, you got the wrapping paper off the new tablet hotness, fired it up and now cannot put it down. But what should you be doing in the New Year to properly feed, protect, and care for your newly found addiction? Well here are some of the basics – things that are easy to do
You just got a new wireless router for Christmas, but when you set it up it asks about wireless security. Do you want WEP, WPA, WPA2 or any of the other alphabet soup options they give? While it’s easiest to just pick the default setting, are you setting yourself up for trouble from aspiring hackers?
Recently we noted that unencrypted credit card storage was on the rise in 2011, and also highlighted the expense involved to the company in the event of a credit card breach. Now we see personal data – including unencrypted credit card information – being paraded out as a part of the recent Stratfor hack. Also,
Ransomware, the practice of providing fake notifications that “you’re infected” and then selling a fake solution that removes the fake malware they just installed, has been a boon for scammers. Now, they’re taking it a step farther, throwing in a law enforcement scare. In this latest scam, an official-looking banner appears on infected machines, purporting
We’ve noted recently that many companies store credit card information in an unencrypted form, sometimes several years' worth. So what happens if your systems get hacked before you get around to securing that credit card data? Sure, there’s the embarrassment of telling your customers their data has been exposed–a legal requirement in more than 40
More websites stored unencrypted credit card payment information than ever this year, according to a recent report. I thought we had this figured out? Obviously this is a direct violation of Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) requirements. But seriously, this stuff is simple for the developers to fix, so why don’t they?
In a scathing and far-reaching US Congressional report released recently the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was characterized in these unflattering terms: “Since its inception, TSA has lost its focus on transportation security. Instead, it has grown into an enormous, inflexible and distracted bureaucracy, more concerned with human resource management and consolidating power, and acting reactively
SCADA, a network-enabled setup for controlling infrastructure, is hitting the headlines in force for falling victim to cyber scammers. There have been several incidents of unauthorized access to Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems recently, from guessing simple passwords, to full-on spear phishing attacks against a hardware vendor, which were then used to access
Well, okay, if you happen to be an extremely fast reader. The Association of Anti Virus Asia Researcher’s (AVAR) 14th AVAR Conference just wrapped up in Hong Kong on Friday. This year, the focus was on security issues in and around the emerging Asian security market, and how to rise to the challenge. As one
