Students from various US military academies will tackle the US National Security Agency in a friendly competition hosted by Lockheed Martin to simulate real-life hacking scenarios that affect government or private networks. The Cyber Defense Exercise (CDX) enables students to train under simulated attack conditions to build experience and prepare for actual scenarios. Saying that practice is vital for train...

The moment you suspect you got scammed, start mitigating the situation not matter if it’s a telemarketing scam, internet fraud, identity theft, counterfeit medicine, or business fraud. First off, disconnect the compromised device from the Internet. But don’t power it off. Some malware pieces are designed to discard their payload at reboot, making it impossible for someone to recover the sample and understan...

A critical security vulnerability in the heating and power systems of German company Vaillant allows unauthorized people access the systems, turn them off and damage them at will. Vaillant has sent all its customers a warning, recommending they manually disconnect the vulnerable devices, namely ecoPower 1.0, from the network and wait for one of their employees to fix the systems on site. Image credit: Vaill...

A search engine developed in 2009 can be used to uncover back doors and low-security devices such as servers, routers, webcams and printers. The Sentient Hyper-Optimized Data Access Network, or Shodan, crawls the Internet to find devices that try to remain undiscovered. According to the developer, more than 500 million devices are searched every month. Hackers may take advantage of the search engine because...

Cybersecurity will get $800 million extra from the new US budget, as President Barack Obama announced a greater need to protect American computers from attacks, according to Reuters. Anti-hacking efforts will rise to $4.7 billion, while the Pentagon’s budget will be cut by $3.9 billion. Money will be mainly invested in “reconnaissance, surveillance, development, maintenance and analysis.” In this way, the P...

A security researcher managed to “hijack” a flight deck system and change a plane’s course in a hacking skill demonstration, according to the BBC. Hugo Teso, an authorized pilot, gave the aviation computer systems new navigation instructions. He then gained total control of the simulated jet he had built using spare parts bought from eBay. “I expected them to have security issues but I did not expect them t...

Germans speaking users are targeted by crooks that compromise their systems and download other malware on their devices depending on the campaign variety they have in mind. Today it can be banking credentials. Tomorrow it can be social networking login data. The next day they use people’s systems to initiate a DDoS attack against who-knows what company or institution website. The present sample is an e-mail...

While some bars have already expressed reluctance in accepting customers with Google Glasses, strip joints joined the bandwagon as the technology could be too disruptive and intrusive. Having the potential of being used to constantly record and broadcast videos; it raises serious privacy concerns for casinos, strip clubs, theaters and other places. Although Google Glasses have not yet been released, some ha...

The recently released second Beta of Mozilla’s Persona web-login technology introduced a new Identity Bridging feature that enables users to login to websites with no credentials other than their email address. While the first beta of Persona required that users register an email address with a Persona Identity Provider server (IdP), the new beta removes the need for first authenticating the email address w...

A new IRS tax spam campaign pumped up by the Cutwail botnet has been found to deliver „goodies” for Android users as well, according to Dell’s SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit. Called Stels, this Android Trojan is a multi-purpose tool impersonating an Adobe Flash update. If it gets installed, the malware can intercept SMS messages, collect contact information and initiate phone calls, as well as install addi...