Business

Will Reddit Get Its Man? New Clues Come Fast As FBI Releases Boston Suspect Photos

The collective energies of a lot of pissed off people were given focus on Thursday, after the FBI released photos and a video of two men – identified as Suspect #1 and #2 – who were identified as the only suspects in the horrific bombing of The Boston Marathon on Monday. Within hours of releasing the photos, new clues to the identities of the suspects emerged on web sites like Reddit. Astute viewers flocked to the popular website Reddit.com to crowd source clues, with a special area or “subreddit,” dubbed “findbostonbombers” created to collect tips and analysis from the sea of fervent users. Their efforts paid off in short order, as contributors identified the brand of cap worn by both suspects (the white cap worn by Suspect #2 is believed to be by Ralph Lauren, while the black cap worn by Suspect #1 is believed to be a Bridgestone golf cap […]

Continue Reading

Juiced: DDoS Attacks 700 Percent Stronger, Iran Joins Top Source Countries

Denial of Service attacks are experiencing a surge in power and duration in the first months of 2013, with Iran joining China and The United States as a top source of the crippling online attacks. The power of distributed denial of service (or DDos) attacks – measured in packets per second – jumped 718 percent in the first three months of 2013, compared to the final three months of 2012, the security firm Prolexic reported on Wednesday. The average bandwidth used in DD0S attacks reached 32.4 million packets per second, overwhelming Internet service providers (ISPs), carriers and content delivery networks designed to mitigate the effects of sudden Internet traffic surges. The data comes from Prolexic’s DD0S Report for the first quarter of 2013. That firm, based in Hollywood, Florida, has become a go-to firm for companies that find their web sites on the receiving end of DDoS attacks. The average attack bandwidth totaled […]

Continue Reading

ACLU Complaint Shows Android Insecurity Getting Political

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday calling on the Federal Government to take action to stem an epidemic of unpatched and insecure Android mobile devices – a public scourge that the ACLU blames on recalcitrant wireless carriers. The civil liberties group’s complaint for injunctive relief with the FTC, noting that “major wireless carriers have sold millions of Android smartphones to consumers” but that “the vast majority of these devices rarely receive software security updates.” Calling the unpatched phones “defective and unreasonably dangerous,” the ACLU says that carriers leave their customers vulnerable to malware and spear phishing attacks that can be used to record or transmit information on the device to” third parties. “A significant number of consumers are using smartphones running a version of the Android operating system with known, exploitable security vulnerabilities for which fixes have been published by Google, but have […]

Continue Reading

Home Invasion: Home Routers May Be The Next Big Hack

Most of us have broadband at home. It’s always there. It works and, for the most part, we don’t think about it until it goes down. Our amnesia extends to the humble home gateway or broadband router that is our connection to the global Internet. That piece of CPE (or customer-premises equipment) probably sits on our desk, or down in our basement gathering dust. Strong password? Meh. Firmware update? Hey, ‘if it ain’t broke…don’t fix it!” But all those small, insecure devices could add up to a major security crisis for users and their Internet Service Provider (ISP), according to researchers at the firm IOActive. Writing on the IOActive blog, researchers Ehab Hussein (@_obzy_) and Sofiane Taimat (@_sud0) say that millions of  vulnerable home routers and gateways are vulnerable to trivial attacks. Those devices could be harnessed by cyber criminal groups, state-backed actors or hacktivists for malware distribution, spam or […]

Continue Reading
1 … 179 180 181 182 183 … 188