A majority of business owners from around the world (68 percent) feel that they're better prepared to ward off a cyberattack and prevent a data breach than their competitors. This is a figure which is up 8 percent over last year's statistic for the same question. This, according to a recent survey by FICO. In the US, power and industrial companies were the most confident, with 86 percent of companies from these sectors rating their firms as either above average, or top-tier in terms of their … Read more
World Cup Avoided Nearly 25 Million Cyber Attacks This Year
According to the Kremlin, Russia prevented almost twenty five million cyber-attacks during the World Cup this year. President Vladimir Putin praised the nation's digital security forces by saying the following: "I expect that your close and constructive interaction will continue and will contribute to ensuring the security of our states and our citizens in the future." Given the high-profile nature of the event, it was hardly a surprise that it would be a tempting target. In a survey … Read more
Clinic Employee Learns That Traveling Increases Data Theft Risk
On May 14th, the Billings Clinic in Montana issued a breach notification statement, which explained that they detected unusual activity within one of its employee's email accounts. The employee in question was traveling overseas on a medical mission when the email account was compromised. "As a result of the forensics investigation, we learned that an unauthorized individual had access to emails and attachments within that one account, some of which included patient information." As for … Read more
Thermal Imaging Could Help Thieves Steal Your Passwords
As if there weren't enough ways for hackers to steal your passwords, now, there's thermal imaging. If that sounds like something straight out of a science fiction movie, think again. Researchers from the University of California at Irvine recently discovered and demonstrated a technique that involves the use of a thermal imaging camera to capture heat traces left by human fingertips as they type passwords into a keyboard. In fact, their technique is effective for up to thirty seconds after … Read more
Massive Breach Affects 21 Million Users Of Timehop App
Do you use Timehop? If you're not sure what that is, it's a popular, clever little app that reminds social media users about posts they've made in the past. It can be quite handy, especially if you're active on numerous social media accounts. Unfortunately, the bloom is off the rose for Timehop. Recently, the company announced that it had suffered a breach on the Fourth of July, which gave the hackers virtually unfettered access to the company's cloud servers for more than two hours. … Read more
Adobe Releases Massive Update To Patch Its Products
There's a lot to like about the contents of Adobe's most recent "Patch Tuesday" update. It's well worth downloading and installing, even if you normally take a pass on all but the most critical updates. Included in this release are security patches for 112 vulnerabilities across four different products, including: Flash Player Acrobat and Reader Experience Manager Adobe Connect We've provided more details below: Updates For Flash Player The security update includes … Read more
Open Database Exposes Info Of 340 Million People
Internet security researcher Vinny Trola recently made a huge and disturbing discovery. A marketing firm called Exactis had left a massive database unsecured, allowing anyone who stumbled across it to access it. As a marketing firm, Exactis collects simply mind-boggling amounts of data on consumers all over the globe. The database in question was a staggering two terabytes in size, and contained more than 150 data fields. Social security numbers were not included in the exposed data. A … Read more
Mobile Users Gain Privacy Protection In Supreme Court Ruling
There's some good news from a recent Supreme Court ruling where privacy is concerned, but take it with a grain of salt. In a recent 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement agencies must obtain a warrant before they can get access to data collected and stored on mobile devices. Of special significance, the court rejected the "third party rule," which dates back to the 1970's and asserts that any data collected by third-parties is automatically devoid of Constitutional … Read more
New SSD Drive Can Hold 8TB of Storage
Good news for the business world in general, and the owners of data centers, in particular. Mass storage is about to get vastly more efficient thanks to Samsung's recently launched solid state drive, which manages to pack an impressive 8TB of storage into a delightfully small footprint, measuring just 11cm x 3.05cm. Not only do the new drives deliver twice the storage capacity of the SSDs used in high-end servers and slim line laptops, but it also has an impressive read speed of 3100 MB/s, … Read more
Vulnerability In Mac OS Went Unnoticed For Years
Researchers at Okta Security have stumbled across something big. Recently, they discovered a flaw in Apple's OS that would have allowed hackers to completely undermine Apple's code signing process. While at first glance that doesn't sound so bad, the implications are terrifying. In a nutshell, code signing uses cryptographic "signatures" to verify and validate code. If code bears the digital signature, it is considered trusted. If it's trusted, then it's given an automatic free pass, … Read more
