SecurityWeek

Las Vegas - Hackers at an infamous annual Def Con gathering in Las Vegas on Friday got schooled in how to be online killers. A rush to go digital with the process of registering deaths has made it simple for maliciously minded folks to have someone who is alive declared dead by the authorities.

Google has decided to disable inline installations for Chrome extensions whose developers use deceptive tactics to trick users into installing their products.

A new version of the DGA.Changer malware uses some new techniques to trick sandbox solutions and researchers, according to breach detection company Seculert.

Researchers at FireEye discovered over the past months several attack methods that can be used to target iOS devices. These “Masque attacks” had not been spotted in the wild, but the recent Hacking Team breach revealed that the techniques have been put to use.

Las Vegas  - A dive into a gun-loving side of US culture by a pair of computer security researchers led them to hack into a digitally-enhanced sniper rifle.

Mozilla updated Firefox to version 39.0.3 on Thursday to address a critical vulnerability that has been exploited in the wild.

Hackers based in Russia penetrated the email network of the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff, leading to a two-week shutdown of the system, NBC News reported Thursday. The Pentagon confirmed that the Joint Chiefs' email system was taken offline pending an investigation but declined to elaborate.

Hackers on Thursday showed how to turn the latest model Square mobile payments readers into crime tools.

LAS VEGAS - BLACK HAT USA 2015 - Researchers have set up a honeypot to see just how tempting vulnerable gas tank monitoring systems are to attackers.

For years the security industry has been focused on measuring the percentage of blocked attacks as a means to demonstrate security effectiveness. And that still holds true. The more threats we block, the fewer we have to deal with inside the network. We must continue to innovate and work diligently to get that number as close to 100 percent as possible. But that’s the catch.

From a computing perspective, we live in a renaissance age. Information technology is not just a tool to help run businesses, but actually an economic factor of production; it is a necessary component in practically every finished good and service, like land, labor and capital. As computing integrates into every facet of our lives, it stretches the inter-connectedness of everything we do and touch.

China-based “Threat Group 3390” Gets Selective in Data Exfiltration

Microsoft announced on Wednesday new changes and further expansion of its bug bounty programs.The company has decided to separate its Mitigation Bypass and Bounty for Defense program. The program, launched in June 2013, was designed to give researchers the opportunity to earn rewards for finding novel mitigation bypass or exploitation defense techniques.

LAS VEGAS - BLACK HAT USA 2015 - The cybercriminal ring behind the GameOver Zeus malware stole an estimated $100 million from banks, but one of the group’s leaders also leveraged the botnet for cyber espionage.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has issued another security warning after login credentials for the ICANN.org website were compromised.