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Nineteen distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks exceeded 100 Gbps during the first three months of the year, hitting a new record, according to researchers from Akamai. The year prior, just eight attacks were over 100 gigabit per second, the firm said. In its latest state of the internet report [pdf], the content delivery network provider analysed more than two petabytes of threat intelligence data and found the total number of DDoS attacks increased by over 125 per cent year on year in the first quarter of 2016. Most of the attacks were achieved through abusing vulnerable network time protcol (NTP) servers,...

Excerpt - NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) plans to release a patch for a new security flaw at its next scheduled update release on Jan. 10, leaving users largely unprotected until then from a rapidly spreading computer virus strain. "Microsoft's delay is inexcusable," said Alan Paller, director of research at computer security group SANS Institute. "There's no excuse other than incompetence and negligence." "It's a problem that there's no known solution from Microsoft," said Alfred Huger, senior director of engineering at Symantec Corp.'s (SYMC) security response team. SANS Institute, via its Internet Storm Center, has taken the unusual...

This alert is a follow-up to a post made yesterday on our blog: http://www.websensesecuritylabs.com/blog/ Websense® Security Labs™ has discovered numerous websites exploiting an unpatched Windows vulnerability in the handling of .WMF image files. The websites which have been uncovered at this point are using the exploit to distribute Spyware applications and other Potentially Unwanted Soware. The user's desktop background is replaced with a message warning of a spyware infection and a "spyware cleaning" application is launched. This application prompts the user to enter credit card information in order to remove the detected spyware. The background image used and the "spyware...