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May 8, 2018 by Vertical Axion
File this one away under self-inflicted wounds. It has recently come to light that a company called LocalBox left a massive data file vulnerable on a cloud server. The data file was more than a terabyte in size and contained detailed psychometric profiles of more than 48 million people. LocalBox describes itself as a combination […]
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May 7, 2018 by Vertical Axion
Recently, a new strain of malware called “SquirtDanger” has been found by researchers at Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, and it’s a particularly nasty one for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, the owner of the malware isn’t orchestrating campaigns himself, but rather, selling his product as a commodity on the Dark Web. That […]
May 4, 2018 by Vertical Axion
Atlanta-based SunTrust Bank is the 12th largest bank in the US. They have a major problem, and so do roughly a million and a half of its customers. According to CEO William Rogers, an unidentified employee of the firm printed a vast amount of private customer information, including their names, addresses, phone numbers and account […]
May 2, 2018 by Vertical Axion
Do you do your banking online? If so, there’s bad news in the form of a report recently released by the security firm “Positive Technologies.” The company tested a variety of websites using a proprietary tool they developed in-house, which scans websites for security flaws. While flaws were found across a wide range of […]
May 1, 2018 by Vertical Axion
Score one for the good guys. A researcher from BrilliantIT was recently able to figure out how infected computers would connect to EITest’s command and control server, and using that information, was able to bring down their entire network. If you haven’t heard of EITest before, the true significance of that statement might not be […]
April 28, 2018 by Vertical Axion
Beware of compromised routers spreading malware. This is according to both Kaspersky Labs and a recently released government report. Using hacked routers to spread malware is nothing new. Security insiders have known about it for years. However, since 2008, the number of instances where routers are being used to push malicious code has been steadily […]
April 26, 2018 by Vertical Axion
If you have an air-gapped computer, you probably think you’re safe. You may think that barring physical access to the machine, no hacker could possibly steal the data on that machine. Unfortunately, you’d be incorrect. Security researchers from the Ben Gurion University of the Negev, in Israel, have discovered a new way of stealing data […]
April 25, 2018 by Vertical Axion
If you’re downloading software from the web, be careful. Take the extra step of verifying that you’re on the developer’s website, because the hackers have a new trick up their sleeve. It’s actually a deceptively simple one. Hackers are buying ads on Google and Bing’s search engines, with the links in their ads pointing to […]
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 […]
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 […]
