If you were an attacker looking for the biggest financial return on your investment in evil criminal schemes, you would probably look at international banking transfer systems as being a nice, big target. In fact, a security investigation company revealed that at a number of banks connected to the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Transactions (SWIFT) network were recently targeted in massive fraud attacks. It may seem surprising, but the attackers were able to easily cover their tracks on the systems they accessed after submitting bogus transfer request messages.

You might imagine nuclear power facilities to have state-of-the-art security, with locked-down computers that can only run software that the installers authorized. Well, this doesn’t seem to be the case in some facilities. At a nuclear power-plant 75km from Munich, Germany, employees discovered serious pieces of malware, including Conficker and Ramnit. In addition, they discovered 18 USB drives that had malware on them in the facility. And this isn’t the only case.

We all tend to know that email message attachments can be dangerous. There are many file types and associated icons we should actually be careful with. […]

Ransomware has evolved as a very dangerous threat to computers and networks. Becoming infected with ransomware is especially costly for businesses that rely on databases of constantly changing information for their daily operation, like hospitals and universities. So, we tend to think that only databases with very sensitive information are likely to be targeted for this kind of extortion by attackers. On desktop computers, there were many ways in which attackers can get malware to encrypt your files and hold your computers hostage. But, while it’s somewhat harder for attackers to encrypt critical data on your mobile device there are a couple of new kinds of extortion that could hit you closer to home – forcing you to pay up to regain access to your mobile phone or tablet.

Sometimes we are so well trained to ignore suspicious pop-up messages while using a web browser that we may miss some important clues about imminent risks […]