Cybercrime

Banks and businesses toiled over the weekend to crush a bug in a widely used open source operating system. The flaw has been in Unix for some 25 years, but it was revealed just last week. If exploited, the vulnerability in BASH could be used to inject malicious code or take command of a system or de...

Walk into any electronics store and you will find antivirus software from companies like Norton, ESET, McAfee and Kaspersky. In the last few years, the risk has spread from our computers to our smartphones and our tablets. The next thing we will have to protect may be our cars -- and our lives could...

Attackers for months have been using eBay listings to redirect visitors to password-harvesting scam sites. They use cross-site scripting to hijack eBay shoppers and trick them into handing over personal data. Smartphones, televisions, hot tubs and clothing are among the items supposedly for sale in ...

Home Depot on Thursday said it had excised the malware demon from its computerized payment system after its recent discovery of a security breach in which thieves stole records of 56 million credit cards. Home Depot stopped short of admitting that an ongoing security upgrade may have contributed to ...

Home Depot may have experienced a massive security breach -- possibly on a greater scale than last year's Target breach, which affected an estimated 110 million people. Home Depot on Wednesday said it was investigating the possibility, following security researcher Brian Krebs' Tuesday alert. Multip...

Domain name registrar Namecheap on Monday reported that it was besieged Sunday night by cyberattackers who employed username and password data possibly stolen by the so-called CyberVor hacker gang. "CyberVor" is the name Hold Security used last month when it reported the theft of 1.2 billion online ...

Hackers appear to have stolen data from JPMorgan Chase and at least one other U.S. bank in retaliation for economic sanctions against Russia. The raid on the banks' computer systems reportedly resulted in the theft of gigabytes of sensitive data. JPMorgan did not confirm the incident. However, the F...

While the cloud promises faster time to market and reduced costs, it also presents a new landscape for hackers to attack and achieve their goals -- namely, to find and gain unauthorized access to data and information. Attackers follow the data they are after, and if that data is residing in the clou...

Businesses increasingly are relying on virtual machines to handle more critical data and tasks than ever before. The reality is that virtualization is growing as a platform for managing customer data, financial transactions and the applications that businesses use. Simply put, virtualization is a co...

The Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL has sent just about everyone who uses the Web for fun or profit gibbering madly in search of a solution, creating fertile ground for spammers, scammers and marketing types. Canada is in an uproar following a disclosure by the Canada Revenue Agency that a hacke...

Bogus web traffic is creating a crisis for advertisers on the Web. Advertisers pay for page views. They assume that those views are tied to living eyeballs. When those views aren't tied to eyeballs -- as when they're generated by automated means -- advertisers can get testy. That's what's starting t...

IBM on Thursday launched a set of software and consulting services to help fight fraud and financial crime. The so-called smarter counterfraud initiative draws from more than 500 fraud consulting experts, 290 fraud-related research patents, and the $24 billion IBM has invested in its Big Data and an...

Target acknowledged Thursday that it put information on a back burner that led to the compromise of more than 100 million customer records and will cost the company millions of dollars in losses. "We learned that after these criminals entered our network, a small amount of their activity was logged ...

Surfing the Internet last year was a dangerous proposition. On average, 200 samples of malicious software were collected every minute by McAfee Labs, the company reported Monday in its threat report for the Q4 2013. All kinds of Internet nastiness increased last year -- from ransomware and suspiciou...

The drama surrounding Mt. Gox, once the world's largest Bitcoin exchange, has intensified. The company on Sunday filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States -- less than two weeks after taking a similar action in Tokyo, where it's headquartered. It apparently made this move to freeze a laws...