Hass and Associates Cyber Security Group

Ikke bli et offer: sikkerhetseksperter advare at online shopping er risikabelt, og tilbyr tips for å sikre deg trygg. Da Megan Roell skjønte hun hadde blitt belastet noen hundre dollar for en kjole somskulle koste $50, hun lærte en verdifull lekse: ikke alle shopping nettsteder er pålitelige. Det var dette siste året. Disse dager, er den 21-år gamle mer forsiktige med å kjøpe ting via Internett.

Nearly one-third of the world's computers could be infected with malware, suggests a report released last week by the Anti-Phishing Working Group. Malicious apps invaded 32.77 percent of the world's computers, a more than 4 percent jump from the previous quarter's 28.39 percent, the report estimates. The increase in infected computers has come hand-in-hand with a jump in the appearance of malware samples, said Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs, the research arm of Panda Security, one of the sponsors of the APWG report. "The creation of malware samples is skyrocketing," Corrons told TechNewsWorld. "It has doubled from the last quarter to the first quarter of this year." In the last quarter of 2013, some 80,000 malware samples a day were discovered by Panda researchers. In the first quarter of 2014, that number jumped to 160,000. Hiding in Numbers By far, most of the new malware strains (71.85 percent) and malware infections (79.70 percent) are Trojans. Less than a quarter of new malware strains (22.70 percent) and malware infections (12.77 percent) are viruses and worms. "At the end of the day, malware is created to steal information," Carrons explained. "Trojans are the most suitable malware to do that." The primary motivation behind creating so many new malware strains is to avoid detection by antivirus programs. Those programs use signatures to identify malicious software. Since each new bad app strain contains a new signature, constantly introducing new strains extends the time a malicious app can remain virulent.

In late 2011 and early 2012, activists, progressive politicians and Internet companies led in part by Internet freedom advocate Aaron Swartz came together to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). Advertised as measures against copyright infringement, the bills would have opened any website that contained copyrighted material it was not authorized to publish on any of its pages to a forced shutdown. A site that unknowingly held a copyrighted image in a comment section, for instance, would have been eligible as a violator. Virtually everyone was susceptible to closure. The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) followed SOPA and PIPA in April 2012. CISPA was worse than its predecessors, proposing that private companies be allowed to share user information, a provision that would have violated many privacy protections of the Internet. Recognizing this, Swartz fought again. "It sort of lets the government run roughshod over privacy protections and share personal data about you," he said of the bill at the time. Again, he prevailed. Now, a year and a half after Swartz killed himself, there is the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act. CISA is a lot like CISPA, but could end up being even worse. Privacy and civil rights groups including the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are standing up to fight it. In an article about the bill, the ACLU's Sandra Fulton wrote: CISA "poses serious threats to our privacy, gives the government extraordinary powers to silence potential whistleblowers, and exempts these dangerous new powers from transparency laws."