Tag: spam

Spam Operation Laid Open, Exposing Data on 1.4 Billion

In-brief: A security researcher searching the Internet for insecure data archives stumbled upon an information gold mine: 5 Terabytes of unsecured back ups belonging to one of the globe’s biggest and longest running spam e-mail operations.

The Real Story Behind Cheating Stories? Blackhat SEO

In-brief: A highly ranked web application for sharing tales of infidelity is the beneficiary of a sophisticated, global campaign of malicious search engine optimization (SEO), according to Akamai Principal Security Researcher Or Katz. (Read more stories by Or here.)

SMEs Face Advanced Threat Sophistication Gap

In-brief: Cisco Vice President Scott Harrell says that small and mid-sized organizations are in the crosshairs of sophisticated cyber criminals. Unfortunately, such firms often lack the tools and skills to identify and contain such threats.

When The Internet of Things Attacks! Parsing The IoT Botnet Story

I spent most of last week at a conference in Florida going deep on the security of critical infrastructure – you know: the software that runs power plants and manufacturing lines. (More to come on that!) While there, the security firm Proofpoint released a statement saying that it had evidence that a spam botnet was using “Internet of Things” devices. The company said on January 16 that a spam campaign totaling 750,000 malicious emails originated with a botnet made up of “more than 100,000 everyday consumer gadgets” including home networking routers, multi media centers, televisions and at least one refrigerator.” Proofpoint claims it is the “first time the industry has reported actual proof of such a cyber attack involving common appliances.” [Read: “Missing in action at Black Hat: the PC.”] Heady stuff – but is it true? It’s hard to know for sure. As with all these reports, it’s important […]

Windows XP Users Six Times More Likely To Be Infected By Malware

Microsoft came out with a new edition of its Security Intelligence Report today, saying that company data shows that Windows XP machines are much more likely to be infected in encounters with malicious software on the Internet. Windows XP machines were six times more likely to be infected than machines running Windows 8, the latest version of Microsoft’s operating system, the company said. The Security Intelligence Report (or SIR) is a unique window into the malicious activity online, given Microsoft’s massive footprint of more than 1 billion systems running versions of the Windows operating system, and the detailed data it collects from them through its automatic update patching- and malware removal features. This is the 15th such report Microsoft has issued.  The company used the latest report to hammer home a message about the need for Windows XP users to move off that system to a newer version of the […]