SecurityWeek

Authors Behind Flame Attempt to Cleanup – Issue Kill Command to Infected Systems

It’s been the story of the week; someone dumps a list of more than six million passwords on a Russian forum, and teams of people start cracking them. There are clear indications that they came from LinkedIn, which the social network later confirmed. Shortly after that, dating site eHarmony says they too had accounts compromised by the leak, and now Last.fm is in the mix. Here’s a recap, and a look at the letter LinkedIn is sending to users.

According to a report from Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA), German armed forces confirmed the existence of a cyberwarfare unit in a document presented to parliament earlier this week. The defensive side of the military’s cyber group is well-known, but the notice to parliament marks the first time that the offensive aspect has come to light in an official report.The report to legislators from Germany’s Defence Ministry outlines the group’s objectives only briefly.

Proofpoint, a provider of Security-as-a-service solutions, on Thursday announced “Proofpoint Targeted Attack Protection”, a new cloud-based security solution designed to provide protection against spear phishing and other malicious, targeted attacks.

A 39-year-old consultant from California, Michael Garcia, has been found guilty sentenced to fifty-seven months in prison for identity theft. According to the court, Garcia committed his crimes while working as an IT contractor.Garcia was a technical contractor, who offered IT support to various firms within the Stockton area. While employed with a law firm and an accounting firm, he accessed their records and copied the personal information for more than 1,450 people.

Microsoft plans to issue fixes for 25 security vulnerabilities in its upcoming June 2012 Patch Tuesday update.

NQ Enterprise Shield Helps Protect Bring-Your-Own-Devices (BYOD) from Mobile Threats Mobile security software provider NQ Mobile this week announced the official launch of its enterprise mobile security offering, NQ Enterprise Shield.

Research from Trusteer shows that device fingerprinting, which is used in fraud detection systems, might be a useless layer of protection after they discovered a manual for bypassing such features being circulated among online criminals.

Yesterday, SecurityWeek published an early report on a story from Dangens IT that a hashed password list containing some 6.5 million records may have been leaked from LinkedIn. Throughout the morning, several people examining the list of password hashes reported discovering their own credentials in the stolen list.

Organizations Need to Understand The Security Gaps The Mobile Enterprise Presents and Embrace a Combination of Security Tools and Techniques to Bridge these Gaps.

Web performance and security firm, CloudFlare, this week announced launched new services with increased performance and features designed to address the needs of larger businesses.The two new offerings, CloudFlare Business and CloudFlare Enterprise, are built on top of the company’s infrastructure and provide services including broader DDoS Protection, WAN Optimization, content delivery, higher levels of support and more.

A hashed password list containing some 6.5 million records has been uploaded to a Russian forum earlier this week. An expert consulted for the story says that there are indications the passwords were taken from the corporate social network LinkedIn, and this has since been confirmed with LinkedEd.

Two researchers in Israel, Yair Amit and Adi Sharabani, recently disclosed that LinkedIn’s mobile application for iOS was transmitting calendar information back to the business social network, without the user being aware in most cases.

On Tuesday, Google said that it will begin notifying an unnamed subset of users, which could equate to anywhere from thousands to millions of people daily, if it is believed they are the target of a state-sponsored attack.Google already has the systems in place to monitor for malicious activity, especially attempts by unknown third parties to monitor users via unauthorized access. Now, Google said, when there is specific intelligence (from either users or their own monitoring mechanisms) that someone is...

The EFF is warning activists in Syria to use caution when downloading documents via Skype, after a new attack blends social engineering with a malicious PDF to install a Trojan on the victim’s computer. This latest attack is just another example of such schemes, the EFF said, which started earlier this year.According to the EFF’s blog post on the matter, Syrian activists are contacted via Skype, and encouraged to download a PDF file that purports to contain plans of assistance...

Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney almost had a Sarah Palin experience, if it wasn’t for the fact that Gawker kept their hands off the leaked goods. After an AP story mentioned Romney’s Hotmail address, Gawker’s anonymous tipster used the password reset function to gain access to it, and sent the details to the news site.

Security startup Mobilisafe officially launched its new cloud-based mobile risk management solution Monday to help IT identify and eliminate the significant risks associated with the Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) trend.

A recent study by Experian Data Breach Resolution says that consumers are far from pleased with the typical response from a company during the aftermath of a data breach. Consumers expect a company to protect their data fully, but when that doesn’t happen, they would also like to have the issue explained fully, instead, they feel left in the dark.

Alert Logic, a Houston, Texas based provider of Security-as-a-Service solutions, today announced that it has closed a $12.2 million round of financing led by new investors Industry Ventures and DH Capital.