A fake Twitter account posing as newly elected Pope Jorge Bergoglio deceived more than 100,000 followers, posting strange messages.
After news broke that Pope Benedict XVI would step down as head of the Catholic Church, fraudsters took to Twitter to take advantage of the developing story.
Half of new retail customer identities will be social networking-based by the end of 2015, which is why merchants need to boost their controls, according to Gartner.
Path, a company that operates a virtual journal application for iOS and Android devices, agreed to pay the FTC $800,000.
A younger workforce exhibiting risky online behavior is a trend that does not bode well for IT management faced with widening threats.
Financial institutions under the FFIEC's jurisdiction have 60 days to comment on proposed guidance designed to ensure they are managing their risk when using social media.
Twitter has fixed the vulnerability, but millions of users may be using third-party applications that allow access to their private communications, known as direct messages.
January 10, 2013
When seeking to attack social networking sites, miscreants don't even have to bother with the client or the server, yet a similar outcome could result. Now is the time for these platforms to prepare for what's to come.
A bug report leads to an update in a Facebook app.
December 20, 2012
2012 was a wild ride for cyber security and data privacy with no signs of reprieve as we slide into the New Year. So, how well did we do on our predictions from last year?
Banking malware Yahos, capable of stealing personal information, spread on Facebook for two years prior to the arrests. The social networking site helped authorities capture the suspects.
Attackers could have mimicked users of Twitter and Facebook, as well as a mobile payments service, if they sent text messages to their accounts using short codes.
November 21, 2012
Software architect Troy Hunt explains how a common Facebook spam campaign functions.
Tried-and-true phishing scams continue to win a psychological game with victims, and have hit Canada particularly hard.
For the first time in nearly a year, Twitter suffered a prolonged outage Thursday, leaving its 140 million active monthly users without micro-blogging capabilities.
Two of the people who head security at Scotiabank, Canada's third largest bank, cited malware and data leakage as their biggest worries, but said shared threat intelligence data can provide helpful insight.
April 05, 2012
A privacy officer at a global company found a way to collaborate efficiently at a top level, while ensuring the protection of company assets, reports Greg Masters.
March 01, 2012
U.S. agencies argue that monitoring social media will arm them with "situational awareness" to thwart potential attacks.
February 01, 2012
Organizations are working overtime to design ways to control, via policy and technology, employees' penchant for sharing private information across social networking and mobile devices.
February 01, 2012
Criminals are finding social media websites like Facebook, which contain a vast array of personal assets, to be a treasure trove of information that they can use to launch further attacks.
2011 was marked by a rise in hacktivism, an evolution in cyber crime toolkits, a preponderance of mobile malware -- namely on the Android -- and increased risks in social media. This resulted in "unprecedented public attention to [these] problems," said James Lyne, director of technology strategy at Sophos. In this video, Lyne describes how organizations can use this newfound cyber awareness to best respond to the challenges.
Spam volume dropped dramatically from 379 billion messages daily in August 2010 to 124 billion this November, according to Cisco, as crooks opted for more pinpointed attacks that could fly under the radar.
The social media giant is "pursuing the appropriate action" against those behind a wave of pornographic content that showed up on users' news feeds this week.
November 01, 2011
A web-based business embraced social media as a business enabler...after putting in place the right tool, reports Greg Masters.
The Canadian government has launched a consumer IT security awareness campaign in a bid to help Canadians protect themselves.
October 03, 2011
As agencies are forced to do more with less, government security pros at a recent SC Magazine Roundtable discussion said they are being challenged to fight emerging threats and secure new technologies.
Facebook is the 21st century chainletter channel of choice.
Just 32 percent of U.S. IT and IT security practitioners said their company has a policy that addresses the acceptable use of social media by employees in the workplace.
The Twitter account belonging to the USA Today was hacked over the weekend by a group called The Script Kiddies. In tweets posted from the compromised account, the hacktivist group bragged about past hacking feats, and urged users to "like" them on Facebook and vote on who they should infiltrate next. It is unclear how the hackers were able commandeer control of the account. The same group also claimed responsibility earlier this month for hacking the NBC News Twitter account and sending a series of erroneous tweets. In that case, a trojan permitted the takeover.
A group of hacktivists was able to compromise the NBC News Twitter account on Friday by tricking the network's social media head into clicking on a malicious attachment. According to an MSNBC report, a group known as The Script Kiddies commandeered control of the account to send a series of tweets falsely reporting an attack on Ground Zero in New York, two days before the 10th anniversary of 9/11. The mischief makers may have obtained the account's login information by duping Ryan Osborn, NBC News' director of social media, into clicking on an attachment, which installed a copy of the password-stealing "Christmas tree" trojan onto his machine. The erroneous tweets were removed soon after they were posted, and the FBI is looking into the matter. Twitter has since suspended the account of the The Script Kiddies, who also have hacked into the Facebook account of Pfizer.
