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Microsoft teamed up with Symantec to take down a nasty malware affecting thousands upon thousands of PCs. Bamital botnet  hijacked people's search experiences and redirected victims to potentially dangerous sites that could leave them vulnerable to other online threats and steal their personal information. Experts from the organizations obtained a court order and shut down servers at a data center in New Jersey and convinced operators in Virginia to shut down a server they control in the Netherlands on Wednesday. The Bamital botnet threatened the US$12.7 billion online advertising industry by generating fraudulent clicks on Internet ads. Microsoft's research shows that Bamital hijacked more than 8 million computers over the past two years. Microsoft says that the botnet affected many major search engines and browsers including Bing, Yahoo, and Google offerings. Bamital's organizers also had the ability to take control of infected PCs, installing other types o...

Researchers at Mocana, a security technology firm in San Francisco, recently demonstrated the ease with which they could hack into a popular Internet-ready HDTV model. They exploited a vulnerability in the software that displays websites on the TV, allowing them to control the information sent to the television. This flaw enabled them to create fake screens for sites like Amazon.com, prompting users to enter their credit card details. Additionally, they could monitor data sent from the TV to other sites. "Consumer electronics makers seem to be rushing to connect all their products to the Internet," said Adrian Turner, Mocana's CEO. "The design teams at these companies have not put enough thought into security." Mocana, along with similar firms, sells technology to protect devices and often highlights potential threats. This test underscores a warning from security experts: the rise of Internet TVs, smartphones, and other web-ready gadgets creates new opportun...

In cybersecurity, confidence is a double-edged sword. Organizations often operate under a false sense of security , believing that patched vulnerabilities, up-to-date tools, polished dashboards, and glowing risk scores guarantee safety. The reality is a bit of a different story. In the real world, checking the right boxes doesn't equal being secure. As Sun Tzu warned, "Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." Two and a half millennia later, the concept still holds: your organization's cybersecurity defenses must be strategically validated under real-world conditions to ensure your business's very survival. Today, more than ever, you need Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) , the essential strategy that's still missing from most security frameworks. The Danger of False Confidence Conventional wisdom suggests that if you've patched known bugs, deployed a stack of well-regarded security tools, and passed the nec...