The possibility of Wikipedia being taken over by attackers was just foiled by quick action on the part of Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, with the help of Check Point, the security firm that discovered the critical security hole in its code.
LiveJournal is a social-media blogging site that attracts millions of users each month from across the globe, especially the U.S. and Russia. Owned by Moscow-based SUP Media, its website is hosted in a Montana data center, and according to Tim Turner, the firm's London-based CIO, LiveJournal regularly faces massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
Refrigerators might hold spam to keep it cold in the meat bin. But in the Internet of Things world, can fridges connected to the Web blast malicious e-mail as part of a botnet? And how about TVs or other smart devices? In the stranger side of the Internet of Things, Proofpoint said it uncovered a cyberattack in which compromised refrigerators and TVs sent out malicious e-mail. But Symantec, says it saw no evidence of such an attack.
Security start-ups Skyfence Networks and Zimperium made their official debut today, while another still in stealth mode, Bluebox Security, announced this week additional funding bringing it to a $27.5 million in venture capital.
Who do you trust? That's a question asked increasingly by a security industry with a growing sense that the National Security Agency (NSA) has sought to weaken encryption or get backdoors into computers, based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden to the media. Now, trust is also the theme of a new conference called TrustyCon that will vie for attention on Feb. 27 in San Francisco while the big RSA Conference for security pros is also taking place in that city.
Start-up Confer recently debuted with software and services aimed at detecting stealthy malware and attackers targeting enterprise servers, laptops and mobile devices. Though market competition is fierce, Confer believes it can win through its application behavior-analysis approach and its cloud-managed threat-intelligence platform that makes use of the open protocol called STIX.
Backed by a lineup of elite investors, start-up Shape Security comes out of stealth mode today by announcing technology it calls Shapeshifter that is said to prevent cyber-criminals from successfully attacking and compromising websites.
Start-up Aorato has come out of stealth mode with what it calls a firewall designed to protect Microsoft Active Directory shops.
President Barack Obama today said his administration is going to change some aspects of how the National Security Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies conduct surveillance and hold data collected on U.S and foreign individuals. But his goals fell far short of what was recommended in the 46 proposals for reform of the NSA spelled out last month by the five-member working group he appointed.
Juniper today announced its Firefly Suite for virtual-machine security, a set of software-based products for VMware and KVM that contain the security and switching capabilities found in Juniper's SRX Series Services Gateway, as well as Junos Space Virtual Director.
Web hosting centers around the world are being compromised by cyber-criminals that use them to launch major attacks against business and government, says Cisco in its annual security report. This threat really gained full steam last year, the company says.
Last fall, after mulling the buy-vs.-lease question, St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center, based in Hartford, Conn., determined that leasing computers would save it 10% based on a three-year timetable.
Several online gaming sites were recently hit by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that used a new type of assault on the victims: a Network Time Protocol Amplification Attack.
Retail store managers would like to know, in real time, how many shoppers enter their premises and what they are likely interested in buying. Security firm Fortinet, which makes the FortiGate threat-management gateways that include a wireless access point, says its gear can now pick up the presence of shoppers' smartphones in order to provide retailers a real-time view of where shoppers go in stores.
The National Security Agency's massive data collection practices that have come to light in the past six months have apparently spooked at least some businesses in Canada and the United Kingdom, based on a survey out today that says many are moving their company's data away from the U.S. due to "the NSA surveillance scandal."