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President Donald Trump has abruptly fired James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) who was leading an investigation into alleged links between Trump and Russia. The White House announced on Tuesday that Comey was fired on the "clear recommendation" of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, citing the reason that he was no longer able to lead the bureau effectively. "While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau," Trump wrote in a termination letter to Comey. Later a memo from the US deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein explained that Comey was fired as director of the FBI over mishandling of the inquiry into Hillary Clinton's emails, including his decision to close this investigation without prosecution ....

Microsoft's own antivirus software made Windows 7, 8.1, RT and 10 computers, as well as Windows Server 2016 more vulnerable. Microsoft has just released an out-of-band security update to patch the crazy bad bug discovered by a pair of Google Project Zero researchers over the weekend. Security researchers Tavis Ormandy announced on Twitter during the weekend that he and another Project Zero researcher Natalie Silvanovich discovered "the worst Windows remote code [execution vulnerability] in recent memory." Natalie Silvanovich also published a  proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code that fits in a single tweet. The reported RCE vulnerability , according to the duo, could work against default installations with "wormable" ability – capability to replicate itself on an infected computer and then spread to other PCs automatically. According to an advisory released by Microsoft, the remotely exploitable security flaw (CVE-2017-0290) exists in Microsoft ...

Nobody likes to do router and firewall management. It often requires a lot of hard labor just keeping the infrastructure up and running. If you ever had to set up IPsec tunnels between different firewall brands, change a firewall rule and hope nothing breaks, upgrade to the latest software or urgently patch a vulnerability – you know what I am talking about. All of these issues have been with us basically forever. Recently, the list of complex tasks extended to getting cloud infrastructure connected to the rest of the network, and secure access for mobile users. There seems to be a change coming to this key part of IT, a silver lining if you will. We decided to take a look at one solution to this problem – the Cato Cloud from Cato Networks. Founded in 2015, Cato Networks provides a software-defined and cloud-based secure enterprise network that connects all locations, people and data to the Cato Cloud – a single, global, and secure network. Cato promises to simplify netwo...

Update (Monday, May 08, 2017):  Microsoft has released an emergency security update to patch below-reported crazy bad remote code execution vulnerability in its Microsoft Malware Protection Engine (MMPE) that affects Windows 7, 8.1, RT and 10 computers, as well as Windows Server 2016 operating systems. Google Project Zero's security researchers have discovered another critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Microsoft's Windows operating system, claiming that it is something truly bad. Tavis Ormandy announced during the weekend that he and another Project Zero researcher Natalie Silvanovich discovered "the worst Windows remote code [execution vulnerability] in recent memory. This is crazy bad. Report on the way." Ormandy did not provide any further details of the Windows RCE bug, as Google gives a 90-day security disclosure deadline to all software vendors to patch their products and disclose it to the public. This means the details of the new RC...

If you have recently downloaded the popular open source video transcoder app HandBrake on your Mac, there are chances that your computer is infected with a notorious Remote Access Trojan (RAT). The HandBrake team issued a security alert on Saturday, warning Mac users that one of its mirror servers to download the software has been compromised by hackers. In case you aren't aware, HandBrake is an open source video transcoder app that allows Mac users to convert multimedia files from one format to another. According to the HandBrake team, an unknown hacker or group of hackers compromised the download mirror server (download.handbrake.fr) and then replaced the Mac version of the HandBrake client (HandBrake-1.0.7.dmg) with a malicious version infected with a new variant of Proton . Originally discovered in February on a Russian underground hacking forum, Proton is a Mac-based remote access trojan that gives attackers root access privileges to the infected system. The af...

Wikileaks has published a new batch of the Vault 7 leak , detailing a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack tool allegedly created by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to target local networks. Since March, WikiLeaks has published thousands of documents and other secret tools that the whistleblower group claims came from the CIA. This latest batch is the 7th release in the whistleblowing organization's 'Vault 7' series. Dubbed Archimedes , the newly released CIA tool, dumped on Friday, purportedly used to attack computers inside a Local Area Network (LAN). According to the leaked documents, this MitM tool was previously named 'Fulcrum' but later was renamed to 'Archimedes' with several improvements on the previous version, like providing a way to "gracefully shutting down the tool on demand," and adding "support for a new HTTP injection method based on using a hidden iFrame." The leaked documents describe Archimede...