Security

U.S. Air Force designates six cybertools as weapons

Six cybertools have been designated as weapons by the U.S. Air Force, allowing the programs to better compete for increasingly scarce Pentagon funding, an Air Force official said on Monday.

Lt. Gen. John Hyten, vice commander of Air Force Space Command, told a conference held in conjunction with the National Space Symposium that the new designations would boost the profile of the military's cyberoperations as countries grapple with attacks originating from the Internet.

"This means that the game-changing capability that cyber is, is going to get more attention and the recognition that it deserves," Hyten told … Read more

Windows 8's rising security tide raises all antivirus boats

In one of the first independent tests of third-party security suites on Windows 8, nearly all antivirus and anti-malware software tested well. What may surprise you is that even without a third-party suite, Windows 8 is relatively resistant to modern threats like zero-day attacks, according to the report.

Independent German security suite evaluators AV-Test.org publish bimonthly tests that rate the effectiveness of the biggest Windows security suites out there and rated all 26 of the suites they tested on Windows 8 in January and February as "certified," including Windows 8 itself. This is because Windows 8 comes … Read more

Samsung goes Absolute for mobile security

Samsung has tapped Absolute Software to embed the corporate security solutions provider's patented persistence technology onto its mobile devices -- most notably onto the upcoming Galaxy S4 smartphone.

Headed for Samsung Knox when it debuts this year, Absolute boasted that Samsung's mobile devices will then be the first worldwide to offer "constant, tamper-proof security connection for tracking, wiping, recovery and IT servicing" by including its endpoint security and management software.

For reference, Knox is Samsung's mobile security platform for professional and personal accounts on enhanced versions of Android.

The Vancouver, B.C.-headquartered company said … Read more

How you may have inadvertently participated in recent DDoS attacks

The risk that an Internet-connected computer is infected with malware will never be reducible to zero. It's just the nature of software that errors happen. Where there are software-design errors, there are people who will exploit those errors to their advantage.

The best PC users can hope for is to minimize the chances of an infection and to mitigate the damage a piece of malware can inflict -- whether it intends to steal a user's sensitive data or to commandeer the machine as part of a cyber attack on servers thousands of miles away.

Last week, Internet users … Read more

Newfound iMessage security issue spams, crashes app

Apple's nearly year-and-a-half old iMessage service has been found to be vulnerable to an attack that uses a flood of messages, or messages so long that the application is rendered unstable.

According to a report from The Next Web, a small group of developers have found themselves the target of an attack that does one of those things -- sending what could be thousands of messages.

The source is suspected to be someone with involvement in pirated iOS software, who could have gotten some basic information needed to send another user a message through Apple's messaging service, The … Read more

Did the spam cyber fight really slow down the Internet?

Reports from Internet monitoring services show that recent news of a cyber attack so big that it made the Internet slow to a crawl around the world was a bit dramatic.

The New York Times reported about spam-fighting nonprofit Spamhaus and a distributed-denial-of-service attack on the Dutch group's site that became the "largest computer attacks on the Internet" and caused a "widespread congestion and jamming crucial infrastructure around the world."

Matthew Prince, the CEO of CloudFlare, the company enlisted to fight the attacks for Spamhaus, told CNET today that the attacks -- which ceased yesterday … Read more

Cyberfight puts a drag on the Internet

A cyberwar is under way between two companies over a recent move made by one.

Spam-fighting organization, Spamhaus, which works with e-mail providers around the globe to block spam from entering in-boxes, has been in a battle over the last week that has seen distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks exceed by several times the typical attacks inflicted on organizations.

Spamhaus hosts a blacklist made up of servers that, it believes, are designed to send spam around the world. Recently, the organization added a Dutch Web hosting company named Cyberbunker to its blacklist. Cyberbunker, which gets its name from its … Read more

Wells Fargo site hit by denial-of-service attack

Wells Fargo was the target of another distributed denial-of-service attack.

The bank's Web site was slowed down by the attack yesterday, affecting a certain number of customers, according to Fox Business News.

"Yesterday we saw an unusually high volume of Web site traffic which we believe was a denial of service attack," a Wells Fargo spokeswoman told CNET today. "The vast majority of customers were not impacted and customer information is safe. For customers who had difficulty accessing the site, we encouraged them to call us by phone, use ATMs or try logging on again as … Read more

GSA vulnerability highlights dangers of SSNs as IDs

Recently, the General Services Administration sent an e-mail alert to users of its System for Award Management (SAM), reporting that a security vulnerability exposed the users' names, taxpayer identification numbers (TINs), marketing partner information numbers, and bank account information to "[r]egistered SAM users with entity administrator rights and delegated entity registration rights."

The notice warned that "[r]egistrants using their Social Security Numbers instead of a TIN for purposes of doing business with the federal government may be at greater risk for potential identity theft." Also provided was a link to a page on the agency's site … Read more