With the increasing usage of mobile devices for critical functions at work, and in banking and ecommerce transactions, coupled with explosive growth in mobile attacks, pressure is building on mobile security.
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Mobile security pressures building
Big Brother’s tool of choice – FinFisher
The commercial intrusion and monitoring kit favoured by governments around the world, is FinFisher, a surveillance tool developed by UK-based Gamma International. It comprises a Command & Control structure and an agent called FinSpy.
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Calamitous password breach
LivingSocial is the latest in a growing line of organisations suffering a calamitous breach in which customer login data has been exposed. It involved 50m LivingSocial usernames and passwords.
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Voted Best New Security Blog
This blog has been voted the Best New Security Blog in the 2013 European Security Blog Awards.
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How sophisticated is the current crop of Android malware?
Much has been publicised recently about the threat of Android malware, including my earlier post of an Android storm warning. The question is: How sophisticated is the current crop of Android malware? I address this question here by evaluating the Stels trojan which appeared recently. I will assess the sophistication of Stels on four elements, and give it a subjective score out of five for each (with 1 being very unsophisticated and 5 very sophisticated):
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A RAT named Poison Ivy
In February 2013, Mandiant published a report exposing APT1, one of the cyber espionage units based in China. They found that APT1 is one of the most prolific cyber espionage groups, having stolen hundreds of terabytes of sensitive proprietary data through Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). Mandiant concluded that APT1 is likely Chinese government-sponsored and has links with the People’s Liberation Army Unit 61398.
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DDoS attacks – how they work
A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack attempts to deny legitimate users of a web service by tying up server resources. Typically, a DDoS attack uses a botnet to send a large volume of traffic to the targeted web service. Botnets are available for hire to DDoS attackers for from $5 to $200 per hour. Generally DDoS attacks continue for about a day and can cause considerable disruption to the targeted organisation.
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