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The number of DDoS attacks increased by 180 percent during the third quarter of this year compared to the same period in 2014.

Companies in Australia and New Zealand are well ahead of world pace in moving away from Windows XP – which is widely expected to become a security nightmare once Microsoft discontinues updates for the platform next Monday – but hundreds of thousands of regional PCs are still running the operating system, according to new statistics from Trend Micro.

Banging the drum for security awareness never gets old. As much as CSOs try to get folks to bone up on safe practices (both online and in the office), there are always going to be some who need reminding.
Online, the biggest battle these days is against botnets: networks of infected computers which hackers can use -- unbeknownst to the machine's owner -- for online crimes including sending out spam or launching a denial of service attack.

There is a new kid in town in the world of botnets - isn't there always? A heavyweight spamming botnet known as Festi has only been tracked by researchers with Message Labs Intelligence since August, but is already responsible for approximately 5 percent of all global spam (around 2.5 billion spam emails per day), according to Paul Wood, senior analyst with Messagelabs, which keeps tabs on spam and botnet activity.

In contrast to the spectacular computer virus outbreaks four years ago, today's attacks are subtle, discreet, carefully targeted and designed to stay below the radar of official security agencies.
One form of these silent yet all-pervasive attacks involves marshalling unprotected home computers into unwitting electronic slave networks called botnets.

Put simply, cybercrime, especially financial malware, has the potential to be quite the lucrative affair. That's only because the bad guys have the tools to make their work quick and easy, though. Cripple the automated processes presented by certain malware platforms, and suddenly the threats -- and the losses --aren't quite so serious.