SecurityWeek

A spate of attacks targeting users in Vietnam and India are infecting users with a backdoor designed to steal massive amounts of information. According to researchers with Rapid7, the targeted attacks are using a malicious Microsoft Word document that exploits vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office to compromise computers with malware known as KeyBoy.

OTTAWA - Canada has also been electronically eavesdropping on Canadians and others, scouring global telephone records and Internet data for patterns of suspicious activity, a newspaper said Monday.

Big Data means different things to different industries and organizations. Today, Big Data not only describes the large and complex data sets that organizations are dealing with, it is also used to describe capabilities found in technologies that produce, process, analyze and protect data.

Google has increased the amount of award money in its bounty program for researchers who discover and report vulnerabilities in Google products.

After publishing the leaks given to them by Edward Snowden, a former technical assistant for the CIA and NSA contractor due to his job Booz Allen Hamilton, the Guardian has revealed another interesting fact: President Obama ordered a list of foreign cyber targets as part of Presidential Policy Directive 20, issued late last year. 

Researchers at Kaspersky Lab have discovered an Android Trojan so advanced, that during the first examination, the company said, the research team knew it was special. In a blog post describing the function of the latest Android threat, Kaspersky noted that the complexity in the Trojan’s code is similar to Windows malware.

JERUSALEM - Israel has been the target of a growing number of cyber attacks from Iran and its militant allies Hezbollah and Hamas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday.

WASHINGTON - The United States' top intelligence official angrily defended his government's secret monitoring of Internet users Saturday, insisting the vast operation is both legal and vital to national security.

SAN FRANCISCO - Google chief Larry Page on Friday branded Internet spying a threat to freedoms and called for governments to be more revealing about what they try to find out about people's online activities.

Network security firm Palo Alto Networks this week launched a new appliance that provides enterprises with a private cloud solution for detection, analysis and prevention of advanced persistent threats (APTs).

WASHINGTON - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Friday he fears the whistleblower who exposed a vast US surveillance program could face the same fate as the US soldier who leaked files to his website.

Well, it is probably not quite game-changing yet, or people would be talking about it more. But the Omnibus Rule (PDF) that updated the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has the potential to be a game changer because of the things it says in writing, as well as some of the things that it doesn’t say.

The Guardian and the Washington Post are on fire this week, crushing the secrecy that used to belong to two intelligence-gathering operations controlled by the FBI and NSA. As a result, there has been a massive backlash against the Obama administration and the Department of Justice, while lawmakers call for an investigation into the latest leak of classified information.

WASHINGTON - The White House defended phone-tapping as a vital tool to combat terrorism Thursday but a further wave of revelations about a vast Internet surveillance program looked certain to trigger fresh outrage.

WASHINGTON - A group of lawmakers proposed legislation Thursday that would deny US entry and freeze the assets of foreign nationals involved in hacking or cybercrimes targeting the United States.

After months of accusations that China was backing extensive cyber-espionage operations against the United States, a top Internet security official in China said it had evidence of U.S. was attacking Chinese targets, too.

Microsoft is planning for a relatively quiet Patch Tuesday next week that features only one critical security bulletin.The 'Critical' bulletin addresses issues in Internet Explorer. The bulletin will be released alongside four others that are rated 'Important' and affect Microsoft Windows and Office. Those bulletins cover remote code execution, denial-of-service, information disclosure and elevation of privilege issues. 

Malware is increasingly shifting to peer-to-peer communications when receiving instructions from command-and-control servers and transferring stolen data to evade detection, Damballa said in a new report.

Microsoft, various financial services organizations, and federal law enforcement have successfully disrupted more than 1,000 botnets that utilize the Citadel malware.

Crime may not always pay, but the companies that experience data breaches certainly do.