A distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) is a cheap but effective way to take out your target’s website by flooding it with so much traffic that the web server becomes overwhelmed and the website crashes. There are those who use DDoS attacks as a kind of online protest, such as hacktivist groups like Anonymous. Then there...

If you’re an IT professional, you know better than anyone else about the concerns that go along with securing a business. Anything and everything from ransomware to phishing emails to lost smartphones – the list goes on and on. But of all the terrors that can plague your organization, which are your top concerns? We...

First, the trick: on Halloween night, PageFair got hit by a Trojan masquerading as an Adobe Flash update. Then, the treat: the company managed to eschew non-apology mumbo-jumbo to issue a detailed, satisfyingly remorseful apology. Beginning late Sunday night, the day after the company discovered the attack, PageFair CEO Sean Blanchfield published a series of updated...

An extremely serious vulnerability lay undiscovered at the heart of much of The Cloud for seven years. The vulnerability (CVE-2015-7835), which affects the Xen hypervisor software used by Cloud hosting companies like Amazon Web Services, is so serious that it was widely patched under embargo before being disclosed on 29 October 2015. It was discovered by 栾尚聪 (好风) of Alibaba and affects Xen software from...

The more cyberthreats spiral, the more cybersecurity pros we need to fend them off. But a new study shows that there are a number of blockages keeping the talent pipeline from being filled. For one, young adults aren’t aware of job opportunities, though they’re generally interested. What’s more, schools aren’t preparing students for the jobs,...

There’s another data breach to report – and it’s a big one, affecting approximately 13 million customers of the “free” web hosting company 000Webhost. The breached data, which includes customer names, emails and plaintext passwords (in other words, the passwords weren’t securely stored), has reportedly been put up for sale on underground markets. What’s worse,...

Action Fraud and the City of London Police have launched a new initiative that aims to separate cybercrime and fraud facts from fiction. Dubbed “Urban Fraud Myths,” the thirteen day campaign kicked off with a look at online dating, a crime which swindled 3543 Brits out of £33.65 million ($51 million) in the last year. Perhaps...

Quiz time: You’re waiting for your train. You spot a flash drive on a bench. Do you: Pick it up and stick it into a device? Forensics the living daylights out of it to find the owner, opening text files stored on the drive, clicking on links, and/or sending messages to any email addresses you...

Last week was week four of Cybersecurity Awareness Month (CSAM) and the theme was Your Evolving Digital Life. It’s an important theme because, in case you hadn’t noticed, your digital life is evolving, and fast. The vast international network of computers we call the internet is gobbling up a lot of new things that didn’t used to be computers like fridges,...

Facebook has announced that it will notify users it suspects are being targeted by nation states and urge them to take extra security precautions. Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer, explained the new notifications in a 16 October blog post, saying users will only receive the warnings if Facebook has strong evidence suggesting they are...