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April 24, 2018 by Vertical Axion
Panera Bread company is the latest to find itself in hot water. Recently, security researcher Dylan Houlihan discovered that the company had failed to encrypt (or otherwise protect) a file containing usernames, email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers and loyalty account numbers for a staggering thirty-seven million of its customers. The file was found stored […]
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April 23, 2018 by Vertical Axion
The bad news just doesn’t seem to stop where Intel and the Speectre vulnerability are concerned. The latest bit of news comes directly from Intel, as the company admits that it’s just not possible to address the Spectre vulnerability in some of its older hardware. This means that nine families of chips and more than […]
April 21, 2018 by Vertical Axion
Microsoft recently made small but significant changes to its Office 365 subscription service and to OneDrive, which are often used in tandem. The goal is to make it easier for users whose files have been encrypted by ransomware (or otherwise corrupted) to recover them. The most significant of the changes is a new button that […]
April 20, 2018 by Vertical Axion
First it was 55 million. Then 77 million. Now, it’s 2.2 billion, or pretty much every user on Facebook. That’s how many people should assume that their public profile information has been scraped. The conversation began when it came to light that Cambridge Analytica (a political research firm) had misused Facebook’s search function to scrap […]
April 19, 2018 by Vertical Axion
Delta Airlines and Sears Corporation have both been notified of a data breach that has exposed the credit card information of some 100,000 Sears customers and “hundreds of thousands” of Delta customers. Neither Delta nor Sears were breached directly. A live chat service called [24]7 (used by both companies), was breached, allowing access to Sears […]
April 17, 2018 by Vertical Axion
Last year’s Wannacry attack was bad, but in many ways, it was a self-inflicted wound. According Webroot’s recently published “Annual Threat Report,” almost all of the machines that succumbed to the Wannacry attack were running Windows 7. That attack is estimated to have caused in excess of $4 billion in total losses. The central problem […]
April 16, 2018 by Vertical Axion
Congratulations to Adobe Flash Player for not being the software most targeted by hackers. Security vendor “Recorded Future” has just published their annual list of the software hackers most commonly focus on when targeting computers and handheld devices for attack. For the last several years, Adobe’s Flash Player has topped the list, but this year […]
April 14, 2018 by Vertical Axion
The energy sector is in danger, and almost nobody is talking about it. This, according to a newly published report by Kaspersky Labs. At issue are ICS (Industrial Control System) computers. Hackers are increasingly targeting them, having recently been given a robust set of tools to do so. Recall that in 2010, Kaspersky Labs uncovered […]
April 13, 2018 by Vertical Axion
How much of your website’s traffic is driven by bots? The answer may surprise you. Overall, bots account for nearly half of all web traffic. The “good” bots account for 20.4 percent, and “bad” bots account for 21.8 percent. Hackers, scammers and fraudsters commonly use bad bots to scrape content, test stolen account credentials, issue […]
April 7, 2018 by Vertical Axion
There’s a new type of hacking attack to be concerned with, and it’s growing by leaps and bounds. Called “Crypto-Jacking,” it’s a process by which malicious code is placed on websites. When the sites are visited, the code secretly siphons off a portion of the affected user’s PC, laptop, or smartphone’s processing power and uses […]
April 6, 2018 by Vertical Axion
Another week, another high-profile data breach. This time, it’s Under Armour in the hot seat. Under Armour acquired the MyFitnessPal app back in February 2015, and the company recently announced that their new acquisition was hacked in late February 2018. So far, the company is taking all steps we’ve come to see as usual in […]
April 5, 2018 by Vertical Axion
If you are a fan of, and regularly use Goo.gl (the URL shortener service), brace for impact. The company has announced that as of March 30, 2019, the service will be shut down for good. Long before then, beginning April 18th of this year, only existing users will be able to shorten links via goo.gl. […]
April 4, 2018 by Vertical Axion
Researchers at Preempt Security recently discovered a critical flaw in Microsoft’s Credential Security Support Provider protocol (CredSSP for short) that impacts every version of Windows in existence. It could allow a hacker to remotely exploit Windows Remote Desktop to execute malicious code and steal any data stored on the machine. The flaw, logged as CVE-2018-0886 […]
April 3, 2018 by Vertical Axion
There’s a new threat on the horizon, according to security researchers from Check Point. A group of hackers in China are busy building a massive botnet that so far, totals almost five million Android smartphones. The hackers are quietly taking control of these devices using a strain of malware known as “RottenSys.” While the malware […]
March 31, 2018 by Vertical Axion
By now, you’ve almost certainly heard of “Spectre,” one of two recently discovered security flaws that impact every chip made by Intel in the last ten years. The story of Spectre, and Intel’s response to it has been an interesting one. In response to the flaw’s discovery, Intel rushed a firmware patch, but quickly had […]
March 30, 2018 by Vertical Axion
According to a Microsoft security researcher, a massive malware attack attempted to install a cryptocurrency mining software on more than 400,000 computers in less than twelve hours. The failed campaign is noteworthy because of the attack vector used. It was a supply chain attack implemented by compromising Bittorrent, a highly popular program used to share […]
March 29, 2018 by Vertical Axion
If your company has an incident response plan that you can rely on in the face of a cyber attack, then you’re ahead of most of the world, according to research recently conducted by the Ponemon Institute. Shockingly, more than 75 percent of survey respondents from around the world admitted that they have no formal […]
March 27, 2018 by Vertical Axion
Freemium software is certainly nothing new. They are free apps that offer premium features if you don’t mind ads displaying while you’re using it or paying a small fee to have the ads removed. At least one company is trying a new business model on for size, albeit with limited success. The company is Qbix, […]
March 24, 2018 by Vertical Axion
It used to be the case that credit card companies and retail outlets were the primary targets of hackers around the world. Make no mistake, they still get attacked with regularity, but the hackers have found a new and even more lucrative target: Health Organizations. According to a new report jointly produced by the Ponemon […]
March 23, 2018 by Vertical Axion
If you post ads on Craigslist for short term employment, be aware that there’s a new malspam campaign that aims to distribute Sigma ransomware on the computers of unwary users. By all outward appearances, the emails seem to come from Craigslist in response to ads posted in Craigslist’s “Gigs” section for short term employment. The […]
March 22, 2018 by Vertical Axion
According to a new report published by Spiceworks, nearly 90 percent of businesses will use some type of biometric technology for authentication by the year 2020. In fact, some 62 percent of companies already use biometrics in some form, with another 24 percent stating their intention to do so within the next two years. The […]
March 20, 2018 by Vertical Axion
The “Spectre” vulnerability that impacts literally every Intel chip made over the last decade keeps finding new ways to make the news. In this instance, researchers at Ohio State University have discovered a new variant of the vulnerability that they have dubbed “SGX Spectre.” To understand how it’s different, a bit of explanation is in […]
March 17, 2018 by Vertical Axion
By now, you’ve almost certainly heard of the “Spectre” and “Meltdown” security flaws that affect every Intel chip produced in the last decade. Users have been waiting for a fix for both of these since January, when the issues were first discovered. From the beginning, Microsoft agreed to include the fix for Spectre in its […]
March 16, 2018 by Vertical Axion
The CEO of Trustico, a TLS certificate reseller based in the United Kingdom, finds himself at the center of a controversy that raises a number of disturbing questions about browser-trusted security certificates. The email in question was sent to Jeremy Rowley, an executive Vice President at DigiCert. The catalyst that prompted the fateful email was […]
