The malware of the future may come bearing real gifts

Sunday, October 12th, 2014

“What,” asked the speaker. “if Notepad behaved just like you would expect it to, but only for the first hour or so that you used it? What if it began to do different things after that?” According to Giovanni Vigna, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the ...

Cyber crime: First online murder will happen by end of year, warns US firm

Monday, October 6th, 2014

Governments are ill-prepared to combat the looming threat of "online murder" as cyber criminals exploit internet technology to target victims, the European policing agency warned. In its most alarming assessment of the physical danger posed by online crime, Europol said it expected a rise in "injury and possible deaths" caused ...

Windows XP users left high and dry as Oracle ends Java support

Friday, July 4th, 2014

Windows XP hold-outs pay attention. If you run the Java runtime on XP, it looks as if the current version is about as good as it gets. The next version, 7u65 and 8u11, due to ship in the middle of July, will not support or run on XP. Oracle hasn’t announced ...

Public Hotspots Are a Privacy and Security Minefield: Shield Yourself

Monday, May 19th, 2014

An axiom among network security pros is that you should treat public Wi-Fi hotspots like the cyber equivalent of public bathrooms: a convenience we all use, but only with the requisite hygiene. You wouldn’t share personal items like a toothbrush or razor with others at an office, gym or airport ...

Word and Excel Files Infected Using Windows PowerShell

Thursday, March 27th, 2014

Malware targeting Word and Excel files has been around for some time, but we recently encountered a new malware family, CRIGENT (also known as “Power Worm”) which brings several new techniques to the table. (We detect these files as W97M_CRIGENT.JER and X97M_CRIGENT.A.) Most significantly, instead of creating or including executable code, CRIGENT uses the ...