Category: blog
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Sophos joins free home AV crowd with Mac release
Business-focused firm takes first step into home-user arena. Sophos has announced the release of a home-user edition of its Mac anti-malware solution, which is being given away free to anyone who wants to use it. Unprotected users of Apple ‘s Macintosh range of computers (reckoned by many to constitute the majority of users at the…
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UK funds allocated to cyber security
New spending on cyber security despite other public cuts. As the UK reels following the government’s announcement of the biggest public spending cuts in decades, one of the few areas to be allocated additional funds is that of cyber security. Prime Minister David Cameron has pledged to spend £650 million over the next four years…
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Dutch banks report huge increase in online fraud
Users warned against phishing and becoming money mules. Figures on online crime released by the association of Dutch banks (NVB) show a significant rise in indicents of online banking that led to damages. During 2009, there were 154 such indicents with total damages amounting to 1.9 million euros – an average of over 12,000 euros…
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Microsoft’s machines hijacked by spammers
Servers also used for DoS attack on security journalist’s site. More than a thousand websites pushing spamvertised pharmaceuticals have been found to be using name servers on hacked machines in Microsoft ‘s IP space. Spammers and malware writers have a habit of hiding as well as they can and operating using hacked computers is a…
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Giant patch release from Microsoft, Oracle
Record Patch Tuesday combines with swathe of extra fixes for corporates. It’s a busy week for corporate admins as Microsoft ‘s monthly Patch Tuesday security bulletin, containing a bumper 16 separate alerts covering nearly 50 separate vulnerabilities in the company’s software range, emerged the same day as a similarly sizeable raft of fixes from Oracle…
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ARF published as IETF standard
Abuse report format helps auto-handling of email complaints ARF (Abuse Reporting Format) has been approved by the IETF as an Internet standard. ARF is a format used to send complaints about email – for instance the report generated when a user clicks a ‘this is spam’ button in their email agent. A draft version of…
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Malicious tweets link to fake TweetDeck update
Twitter resets passwords for accounts that appear to have been hacked. Twitter users who recently clicked on links in tweets urging them to upgrade their version of TweetDeck – the popular desktop software used to read and post on Twitter – may have found themselves infected with a trojan. Many of the tweets, which are…
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Microsoft releases new fix for DLL vulnerability
Earlier workaround believed to be too complex for most users. A week after Microsoft released a fix for a DLL vulnerability that affected a large number of programs running on its operating systems, it has released a second fix for the same problem. DLLs (Dynamic Link Libraries), which contain commonly used functions, are essential to…