Trusted research on email, mobile, web, and DNS security.
It’s been a hot year for messaging security. In our 2014 Annual Security Threat Report we take a look at, among many other topics, findings of DNS resource exhaustion/water boarding at a major ISP, a deeper look at the highest volume spam campaign to reach Apple iMessage users to date, and delve into the a […]
On the morning of December 9th, Swedish Police in Nacka, Stockholm raided a data center in connection with copyright violations. The takedown, aimed at enforcing international intellectual property rights, hit the servers of popular torrent site The Pirate Bay (TPB). Other torrenting and Pirate Bay sites seem to have been hit as well including the […]
2014 has seen some interesting developments in computer security and the lack thereof: the growth of encryption based ransomware, the exposure of several highly sophisticated state sponsored cyber espionage malware packages, the takedown of the Silk Road drug sales website (twice), a series of massive credit card breaches from major retail chains in the US, […]
SMS Bank and account phishing in the U.S. more than tripled in September and continues as the nation’s number one category of reported SMS. However, some very notable cities such as New York City have dodged these malicious attempts at users’ financial and account details. Over the past two months, we’ve seen a sharp increase […]
Years ago, when one of my university friends, who later went on to become an academic mathematician, told me his research at Oxford University was being sponsored by the UK’s intelligence agency GCHQ, I asked him what he was working on. “Tests for prime numbers.” “Oh, that’s very relevant to code breaking, isn’t it Richard?” […]
When I heard late last year that Snapchat had turned down an offer of three billion dollars for the company, my first thought was, what sort of person would turn down that sort of money for a company that has never made a profit and has no real model for monetization? It turns out the […]
In August 2013, Ladar Levison shut down Lavabit, a secure email service, after the US Government ordered him to turn over the private key for his company. The FBI had a search warrant to view the mail of a single user, probably Edward Snowden, but Lavabit had been designed so that individual user’s email was […]
Starting on October 28, we saw a new hook used to try and trick users into installing a Trojan on their computer – Free Pizza. Fans of Robert Heinlein will be familiar with the acronym TANSTAAFL – There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. In this case TANSTAAFPE – There Ain’t No Such […]
Just the act of Googling “Lollipop security” is reason for pause – who knows what surveillance list that might trigger? But do so and you’ll discover that the presumably amply insured head of Android security doesn’t bother locking the front door to his urban San Francisco home. As Seth Rosenblatt of CNET reports, the exact […]
This quarter we investigate knock-off designer goods pitched by way of Apple iMessage’s first major spam campaign, examine the curious patterns of sub-domains generated for by DNS resource exhaustion attack, discuss the popular Peter Pan attack, and more trends in Cloudmark’s Q3 2014 Security Threat Report. On-going since last quarter, iMessage has been hit with the […]