SecurityWeek

North Korea's Internet was on the fritz for a second day Tuesday. But the US is staying silent on whether it launched a cyber attack as payback for the hacking of Sony Pictures. And in the murky world of cyber security, experts say there are several plausible scenarios for why North Korea suddenly went dark, stressing it's impossible to know exactly what happened.

Researchers with EMC's RSA Security Division have pulled back the covers from the Backoff malware in a new report.

A server that lacked two-factor authentication was the gateway hackers used to breach JPMorgan Chase this year, according to a report. 

For far too long, the conversation around cloud and security has revolved around Shadow IT, the use of cloud applications that IT doesn’t know about. The reality, however, is that 90% of corporate data will reside in the SaaS applications that are approved for business use. That’s where the attention of IT organizations should focus on – how to extend visibility, governance and protection to these SaaS applications.

The visitors of several official Afghan government websites might have had their devices infected with malware after a threat group believed to have ties to China compromised the sites through a content delivery network (CDN), a new report has revealed.

Staying on top of your organization’s security needs is no easy task. The constant updates, patches, vulnerability assessments and maintenance activities can quickly overwhelm an IT department or security team and delay critical projects. To-do lists end up growing at an incredible pace, and even those who are able to keep up are having a hard time measuring whether their efforts truly made the organization safer.

In response to the increase in online payment fraud, the European Banking Authority (EBA) published last week a set of minimum security requirements that payment services providers in the European Union are expected to implement by August 1, 2015.

Security experts say that a new version of the increasingly notorious Vawtrak malware has been spotted with significant code and configuration changes.

North Korea appeared to have been hit by Internet outages, reports said Monday, just days after US President Barack Obama warned Washington would retaliate for a cyber attack on Sony Pictures blamed on Pyongyang.

Researchers at Group-IB and Fox-IT have released a report detailing the activities of a hacking crew linked to the theft of more than one billion rubles ($17 million) from a mix of Russian banks and Western retailers.

An attacker can make malicious modifications to the firmware of Apple MacBooks and keep the devices under his control even after the operating system has been reinstalled, according to a researcher.

The Tor anonymity network might be disrupted in the next few days via the seizure of directory authorities, the Tor Project has learned.There are a total of nine directory authorities spread out in the United States and Europe. These servers provide a signed list of all the relays that make up the Tor network.

According to Gartner, worldwide spending on information security was expected to reach $71.1 billion in 2014, an increase of 7.9 percent over 2013. Total information security spending will grow a further 8.2 percent in 2015 to reach $76.9 billion. Based on these numbers it would appear that we have made progress towards a more secure world in the past 12 months. Did we? And what can we expect in 2015?