The hackavist group Anonymous is in the news again. This time it has threatened to take down the Internet itself this coming Saturday, 31 March 2012.

The move, styled “Operation Global Blackout” is in retaliation for law enforcement cracking down heavily on the group and arresting about 25 members last month. Another reason is retaliation against the US Congress persisting in its efforts to get revised versions of the Stop Internet ...

In an age where social media networking dominates, cyber criminals also work overtime to hijack or commandeer social media accounts to do their bidding.

Latest research from security major Kaspersky Lab indicate that cyber criminals are now polluting the official Chrome Web Store by uploading malicious Chrome browser extensions there, aimed at hijacking Facebook profiles. Browser extensions have the power to intercept anything that a user does through the browser. When ...

A recent study undertaken by Aspect Security and Sonatype, open-source software repository reveals open-source code libraries as rife with vulnerabilities. The study, titled “The Unfortunate Reality of Insecure Libraries” examined 113 million user downloads from 31 popular libraries of open source code over the previous year and discovered that about one in every four downloads had some vulnerability or the other.  In all, about 19.8 million downloads had vulnerabilities, and ...

Latest research on how to eliminate gaps in policy-based network security conducted at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) raises some interesting findings.

Firewalls are usually the first line of defense against cyber threats. But are firewalls a part of the solution or part of the problem? Research at AFDA seems suggest the latter. The existing firewall technology bases itself on access policy, which makes it incapable of anticipating features of ...

The annual RSA Security Conference is a prime event in the field of network security, offering an opportunity for industry experts to disseminate views and share ideas. In this video interview, Paul Kurtz, General Manager of Cyber Point discusses the state of software security among technology vendors.

The University of Tampa in Florida unearthed a major data breach last month, thanks to an in-class project on advanced search techniques that stumbled on a file containing the name, Social Security Number and Date of Birth of over 6,800 students enrolled with the university.

The breach occurred eight months ago, in July 2011, when the University IT team created three temporary files to resolve a problem related to issuing ID ...

With hackers trying out innovative ways to breach networks, every single instance for web activity has become vulnerable. One major net activity is searching the internet for information through Google or Yahoo search. As things stand, any determined and enterprising cyber criminal can snoop and intercept such traffic as it passes through the internet to unearth sensitive information.

Towards making the crucial search activity more secure, Google has rolled out the ...

Injecting poisoned ads to websites is one common way hackers spread malware. Now ads in mobile apps threaten to cause even more damage.

A study at the North Carolina State University on 100,000 apps in Google Play finds that half of them include ad libraries. What makes such ad libraries dangerous is that 300 of them could download code from remote servers. Needless to say, all hackers need to do is ...

Researchers from antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab have unearthed a new hard-to-detect malware.

Most malware enter a victim’s computer when the user commits a mistake, knowingly or unknowingly. But this new malware, which spread through drive-by download attacks, exploit vulnerabilities in Java and outdated software, infecting computers even without the user having to do anything. What makes this malware doubly dangerous is the fact that this virus does not create any files ...

Microsoft has released a series of six patches to fix seven vulnerabilities that affect Windows OS, Visual Studio application development platform and Expression Design graphics software.

A key vulnerability that the patches resolve is the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) bug that allows hackers to perform remote code execution through reverse engineering techniques. The vulnerability is extremely dangerous as it affects all Windows versions, bringing back memories of the deadly Morto Trojan ...