Hacking

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Malicious Emailers Find Healthcare Firms Juicy Prey

Healthcare providers have garnered growing interest from hackers in recent months. More evidence of that trend appeared last week in a report on email trust. An email that appeared to come from a healthcare company was four times more likely to be fraudulent than an email purportedly from a social m...

The United States' National Security Agency and British spy agency GCHQ have hacked into the internal computer network of Gemalto, the world's largest maker of SIM cards, and stolen the cards' encryption keys, according to information in files leaked by whistle-blower Edward Snowden. Gemalto makes a...

Google is fighting a proposed amendment to Rule 41 of the U.S. Criminal Code that might allow authorities to hack into computers abroad. The amendment seeks to empower a magistrate in a district where activities related to a crime may have occurred to issue a warrant for remote search of computers, ...

Motorists in the United States are increasingly at risk of cyberattacks and violations of privacy, as more and more technology is added to their cars. A report released on Sunday by the office of Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) listed a number of key findings that are based on responses from 16 auto makers...

Hackers broke into the databases of Anthem Inc., the second-largest health insurer in the U.S., and stole up to 80 million customers' personal information. The data includes current and former customers' names, birthdays, medical IDs, social security numbers, street addresses, email addresses and em...

Is It Time to Trash Flash?

On Monday, Adobe Flash Player users were hit by a zero-day flaw for the third time in two weeks. The company issued a security advisory for the vulnerability, which it dubbed CVE-2015-0313. The flaw exists in Flash Player 16.0.0.296 and earlier versions on Windows and Macintosh platforms. Successful...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

POS Terminals Rich Vein for Gold-Digging Hackers

Hackers are like gold miners. Once they find a rich vein for their malware, they mine it until it's dry. Point-of-sale terminals are such a vein. Following the success of the Target breach in 2013, the hacker underground was quick to rush more POS malware to market. "Attackers have recognized that t...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Businesses Waste Big Bucks Fighting Phantom Cyberattacks

Businesses spend an average of $1.27 million a year chasing cyberthreats that turn out to be dead ends. That is one of the findings in a report released last week on the cost of containing malware. In a typical week, an organization can receive nearly 17,000 malware alerts, although only 19 percent ...

The United States National Security Agency reportedly knew in advance that North Korea was about to hack into Sony's systems. The NSA apparently penetrated North Korea's network through several vectors, including Chinese networks used to connect with the rest of the world and hacker connections in M...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Sony Sortie's Smoking Gun Still Missing

Recent research from security firm Cloudmark has raised doubt about the purported connection between North Korea and last November's intrusion on Sony Pictures Entertainment's computer networks. The FBI last week continued to press its case that North Korea was behind the cyberattack, pointing to an...

FBI Director James Comey has "very high confidence" that North Korea was behind last November's cyberattack on Sony, he said at a cybersecurity forum held last week at Fordham University. The attack resulted in large amounts of intellectual property, confidential communications and employee data bei...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Fingerprint Theft Just a Shutter Click Away

Ever since smartphone makers started incorporating fingerprint scanners as a means of unlocking mobile phones, the Chaos Computer Club has attacked the technology with vigor. Not long after Apple added Touch ID to its iPhones, the German hackers demonstrated how to lift prints from a surface and cre...

Hacker Jan Krissler, aka "Starbug," this weekend told attendees at the 31st Chaos Computer Club convention in Hamburg, Germany, that he had replicated the fingerprints of German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leven using a standard photo camera and commercially available software from VeriFinger. K...

Vulnerabilities in Signaling System 7, telephony signaling protocols used by carriers worldwide, allow third parties to listen to people's cellphone calls and intercept text messages despite encryption, The Washington Post reported last week. German cybersecurity researchers Tobias Engel of Sternrau...

OPINION

The Untold Stories of 2014

It is time to look back at 2014, so I'll focus here on a series of stories I thought were interesting but didn't seem to catch much or any real air. Some, like what is really behind Sony's decision to pull The Interview still might take off. Hadoop analytics is one of the most powerful platforms to ...

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