SecurityWeek

Researchers at IntelCrawler have pulled the covers away from a cybercrime operation that has compromised nearly 1,500 point-of-sale (PoS) terminals and other systems around the world. The firm calls the botnet 'Nemanja'. Composed of PoS terminals, accounting systems and grocery management platforms, the researchers said they discovered it earlier this year.

AVAST Software, the Czech Republic-based antivirus company, has shut down its community-support forum after suffering a data breach that affected roughly 400,000 users.

VirusTotal, the popular service that lets users analyze suspicious files and URLs to help facilitate the detection of malware, has launched a Mac OS X version of its VirusTotal Uploader utility.

WASHINGTON - With cybersecurity's most glaring failures in the limelight, many experts say it's time for a new approach.

In a motion submitted on Friday to the United States District Court in the Southern District of New York, the government recommended that Hector Xavier Monsegur, a.k.a. the hacker "Sabu," have his sentence greatly reduced as a result of his cooperation with authorities.

On Monday, representatives of New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) confirmed that the organization’s FitzRoy supercomputer was targeted in a cyberattack last Thursday.

Security researchers from Trusteer have been monitoring a new Trojan which they’ve dubbed Zberp, and is a combination between Zeus and Carberp families of malware.

WASHINGTON - The US House of Representatives passed landmark reforms Thursday curbing bulk collection of Americans' telephone records, the first step toward restricting intelligence-gathering by the National Security Agency since Edward Snowden divulged the secret program last year.

Security experts and eBay have confirmed that a recent user database being advertised on Pastebin was not obtained as a result of the data breach suffered by the online marketplace earlier this year.

Apple has released Safari 7.0.4 and Safari 6.1.4 to address a total of 22 vulnerabilities affecting WebKit, the open source rendering engine that powers the popular Web browser.One of the vulnerabilities, CVE-2014-1346, was found and disclosed by Erling Ellingsen of Facebook. The flaw was caused by an encoding issue in the handling of unicode characters in URLs.

F5 Networks announced on Thursday that it has acquired cloud-based security provider Defense.Net for an undisclosed sum.

French security research company Vupen has published the details of the use-after-free vulnerability its team exploited at Pwn2Own 2014 to hack Mozilla Firefox. At Pwn2Own 2014, the hacking contest that takes place alongside the CanSecWest security conference, Vupen earned a total of $400,000 for demonstrating their exploits against Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash. A total of 11 zero-day exploits were used.  

Facebook is working with Trend Micro and F-Secure to protect its customers against malware. In a partnership, free anti-malware software downloads are being incorporated directly into the social network’s abuse detection and prevention systems.

Law enforcement authorities from all over the world arrested around 100 individuals suspected of creating, distributing and using BlackShades RAT (ShadyRAT). However, experts say it's unlikely this will end the use of BlackShades.

Researchers with Akamai Technologies have witnessed a significant uptick in Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) reflection attacks since April 11. SNMP is typically used in devices such as printers, routers and firewalls that can be found both in the home and enterprise environments. According to Akamai's Prolexic Security Engineering and Response Team (PLXsert), it is the devices that support SNMP v2 are most often used in the attacks.

Trustwave has released its Global Security Report for 2014. The new study is based on data gathered from 691 breach investigations and focuses on security threats, cybercrime and data breaches. Payment card data continues to be the top type of data that's compromised in breaches. However, the percentage of data thefts involving confidential, non-payment card data has reached 45 percent in 2013. This represents a 33 percent increase compared to the previous year. 

Cisco Systems is planning to acquire malware analysis and threat intelligence solution provider ThreatGRID. The financial details of the deal were not made public.

Hewlett Packard's Zero Day Initiative has released information about a zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer 8 that empowers the attacker to remotely execute code.

Just as a good novel has themes, so too do the security challenges facing industrial control systems.