US election day faces specter of cyberattacks
Don’t be surprised if hackers make their presence felt on U.S. Election Day. Distributed denial-of-service attacks and high-profile leaks are among the tactics they might use if they try to influence Tuesday’s vote. Cybersecurity experts stress it would be incredibly difficult to hack the U.S. election. The system itself is distributed across the country over thousands…
China’s vague cybersecurity law has foreign businesses guessing
The most disturbing thing for foreign businesses facing China’s new cybersecurity law may just be how vague and broad it is. Under the new law, adopted on Monday and taking effect next June, it’s possible that any major company working in the country might be subject to “security reviews” from the Chinese government.
Was Theft Of Money From 20,000 Tesco Bank Customers An Inside Job?
UK bank confirms attack, but so far has not used the word ‘hack.’ Threat actors appear to have broken new ground with an attack on the UK’s Tesco Bank where they managed to steal money from more than 20,000 accounts at nearly the same time in automated fashion. Details of the weekend attack are still…
Cisco Resets Passwords on Careers Portal
Cisco last week prompted a password reset for the user accounts on its Cisco Professional Careers mobile website after a security researcher discovered a vulnerability in the portal. The networking giant decided to reset the user passwords to ensure that accounts are kept secure, and says that the issue would have resulted in exposing “a…
Securing Black Friday sales: Is your business ready?
Black Friday is the day following Thanksgiving Day in the US, well-known for a variety of promotional sales. These are dependent on Internet connections working, servers coping with demand, in-store bandwidth holding up for transaction processing, and more. Both in-store and online, Black Friday sales are dependent on technology.
Retailers overconfident in endpoint security
A new study conducted by Dimensional Research evaluated the confidence of IT professionals regarding the efficacy of seven key security controls, which must be in place to quickly detect a cyber attack in progress. Study respondents included 763 IT professionals from various industries, including 100 participants from the retail sector. Despite unique attacks on their…
ADC Attacks Can Cause Damage in Industrial Environments
Malicious actors could cause physical damage by exploiting flaws in how analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are used in industrial environments, researchers warned. ADCs are electronic devices that convert analog signals, such as voltage or amperage, into digital signals. In industrial environments, ADCs can be used to produce a digital number from an analog signal coming from…
Tip of the week: How to delete unwanted programs
Generally speaking, programs you don’t want — the bloatware that came with your computer or piggybacked on software updates, for example — often are not really dangerous. Nevertheless, they may be a drag in various ways, launching unwanted processes and slowing down your system, tracking your movements online and sending personal data to software developers….
What about the personal data on those millions of recalled Note7s?
The users of millions of faulty Samsung Galaxy Note7s, already turned in, face a bigger potential dilemma than whether the devices might blow up: The fate of their personal data on the devices. Many of the users of some 3 million Note7 devices sold were told by Samsung and government officials to immediately stop using…
The Internet of Trouble: Securing Vulnerable IoT Devices
There are times when perception will coalesce around something that has been previously known, but not taken seriously. That is what happened recently with the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) weaponization of the Internet of Things (IoT). Although government agencies have issued warnings about the potential problem of vulnerable IoT devices, nobody has ever really done anything…