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PCR has dug out some of the biggest security stories from the past week.
Including Microsoft’s big Freak fix, how 75 million malware sample were neutralised and how many users have encountered content the see as a danger to children.
But first…
Kaspersky reveals latest cyberespionage tactics
Nation-state sponsored cyber attacks are becoming more complex as time goes on, targeting carefully chosen users with sophisticated, modular tools, but keeping well under the radar.
Kaspersky Lab specialists discovered that since the increasing success of exposing threat groups, the more sophisticated threat actors now focus on increasing the number of components in their malicious platform to enhance stealth.
Costin Raiu, director of global research and analysis team at Kaspersky Lab, said: “Nation-state attackers are looking to create more stable, invisible, reliable and universal cyberespionage tools.
“They are focused on creating frameworks for wrapping such code into something that can be customised on live systems and provide a reliable way to store all components and data in encrypted form, inaccessible to regular users.”
68 per cent of users discovered content dangerous to children last year
Kaspersky has been busy, as it also recently conducted a research that found that 59 per cent of users asked, encourntered pornography when not searching for it, 26 per cent stumbled upon gambling sites, a fifth saw sites featuring weapons, and the same amount with strong language and substance abuse.
China, USA, Germany, Russia and the UK were the countries that recorded the highest frequency of this kind of site.
How easy it is to unintentionally follow a link to a site of thus kind of nature is worrying, considering how much more active kids are online compared to adults.
The research found that on YouTube, adult content was on average just three clicks away from a Peppa Pig video for example.
Apple and Microsoft fix Freak vulnerability
The recently found Freak security vulnerability, which was found last week in Mac OS X, iOS and Windows OS has been patched up.
The Freak allowed hackers to decrypt HTTPS-protected web traffic between browsers and millions of websites, meaning they could intercept sensitive data such as logins and bank details.
The updates to patch up Freak also include a patch against Stuxnet, a worm discovered on Windows PC back in 2010.
75 million malware sample found and killed in 2014
PandaSecurity’s anti-malware lab, PandaLabs revealed that throughout 2014 it discovered 75 million malware samples and neutralised them.
This is more than double that of 2013, and around 30 million new malware strains.
Since it launched, PandaLabs has discovered 220 million malware specimens, meaning 34 per cent of all malware ever created was coded in 2014, in fact bout 200,00 new strains of malware was created every day last year.
