PCR Tech and IT retail, distribution and vendor news
We take a look at some of the top security headlines over the past week.
80% of UK brands at risk from online trolls
After the controversial .sucks domain appeared on June 21st, only 20 per cent of the UK’s top brands have snapped them up, leaving 80 per cent of the UK’s brands vulnerable to online trolls, according to domain name registrar 34SP.com.
Daniel Foster, co-founder and technical director at 34SP.com said: “Our advice to businesses generally is to seriously consider registering .sucks domains before someone else does.
“Paying the annual cost could be pennies of what a company might need to fork out if the domain is registered by someone else; and the business has a crisis management issue on its hands if controversial content is hosed under its name.”
Smart printers bring vulnerability issues to businesses
Smart printer devices are presenting more possibilities for internal and external breaches within businesses, according to Annodata.
Figures form the Department of Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) has revealed that 93 per cent of large organisations experienced a security breach last year, while 87 per cent of small businesses experienced a security breach.
Grant Howard, professional services technical manager at Annodata, said: “Many hackers will be able to access the entire network through tracking the metadata of printed documents, or by hacking the passcode of the MFP. Whether these breaches are caused by an attack from an unauthorised outsider, or internal factors, such as human error, systems must be put in place to resist disruption to the network.”
UK politicians deliberately hacked to show dangers of public Wi-Fi
F-Secure, Mandalorian Security Services and Cyber Security Research Institute teamed up this week, to show how dangerous public Wi-Fi can be.
The companies hacked various politicans to demonstrate how easy it is to hack a user. You can check out the rest of the story on PCR’s sister site IT Channel Expert.
Take a look at the video on F-Secure’s Facebook here.
17-year-old convicted of Lizard Squad hacks
This week, a 17-year-old has been convicted for various computer hacks found in relation to Lizard Squad. Julius "zeekill" Kivimaki has been given a two-year suspended prison sentence for 50,700 computer crimes.
The Lizard Squad has been responsible for a range of hacks over the years, including the attack on PlayStation and Xbox networks.
Internet anonymity software leaks users’ details
Services used by people to protect their identity online are at risk of being leaked, according to researchers at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and others.
A study if 14 Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) found that eleven of them leaked information about the user because of a vulnerability known as ‘IPv6 leakage’. The leakage occurs because network operators are increasingly deploying a new version of the protocol used to run the internet called IPv6.
Bitdefender partners with Blue Software, 32% of malware is Android ransomware
Bitdefender has found that around 32 per cent of all reported malware during May was Android ransomware. The company also believes that this number will rise in the next 12 months.
In addition, the company has found that 19,000 malicious emails have been sent out in three days from spam servers worldwide. The emails pose as a follow-up from a tax consultant, and invite users to download an archive containing malicious malware.
Plus, Bitdefender has announced a new partnership with software distributor Blue Solutions, which will see its range of software and antivirus products distributed to IT managed service providers across the UK.
Company puts security software to the test
This week, AV Comparatives, a company that tests anti-virus software, published a document that compared 20 of the most well known security software solutions.
The test measures a PC system’s speed at file copying, archiving and unarchiving. As well as launching and uninstalling applications, and found that Avast, Emsisoft, Avira, Kaspersky and AVG made the weakest impact on a PCs overall perforce.
Small businesses unaware of security threats
Small businesses do not recognise that their company could be at risk of cyber attacks, so says CSID, a provider of identity protection and fraud detection solutions.
The research revealed that 52 per cent of small businesses in the UK are not trying to protect themselves against cyber crime, while 85.3 per cent do not have any plans to increase their budgets for security implementation.
Web marketers bypass Google’s page ranking system
SophosLabs researchers have found web marketers are using a hack to trick Google’s page ranking system into giving them the top billing.
Sophos says the trick carried out by the marketers ‘inflated the reputation of dubious pages, and sent them dishonestly scooting up the search rankings’. The process is called cloaking and managed to bypass Google’s defense mechanisms.
Image source: Shutterstock
