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Symantec enterprise and Norton security product users are being urged to patch their applications immediately after multiple dangerous vulnerabilities were discovered. The security firm has advised that 17 enterprise security products and nine Norton consumer offerings are affected. Google Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy discovered the flaws. The most serious is that the products unpack compressed executables in the operating system kernel to analyse them for malicious code. He said this dangerous practice means the vulnerability can be exploited by simply sending a link or an email - users don't need to do anything to activate an attack.

Cybersecurity specialist Check Point has been tracking the malware called HummingBad since its discovery in February and claim there has been a spike in infected devices. In a new report, Check Point said the malware was a multistage attack chain with two main components, which first infected Androids when people visited certain websites. “The first component attempts to gain root access on a device with a rootkit [software] that exploits multiple vulnerabilities. If successful, attackers gain full access to a device,” the report read. “If rooting fails, a second component uses a fake system update notification, tricking users into granting...

A researcher has discovered a new low-level zero-day exploit that overrides the protection for the firmware code in Lenovo ThinkPads and other laptops, bypassing hardware and Windows security features. Last week, Dmytro Oleksiuk, also known as cr4sh, released the code for his ThnkPwn proof of concept on Github, showing how it can be used to exploit a flaw in the unified extensible firmware interface (UEFI) driver for privilege escalation. This lets attackers remove the write protection for system flash memory, and allows them to run arbitrary code with full access to the entire victim system. Lenovo had not received advance...

Liz Upton, the Director of Communications for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, has tweeted out a screenshot of an email where an unknown person has proposed that the Foundation install malware on all of its devices. In the email, a person named Linda, is proposing Mrs. Upton an agreement where their company would provide an EXE file that installs a desktop shortcut, that when clicked redirects users to a specific website. (Raspberry Pi devices can run Windows as well, not just Linux variants.) Linda from company Q[edited] is also inquiring Mrs. Upton about the Foundation's PPI (Price per Install). Judging from...

REDMOND, Wash., Jan. 27 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Microsoft Corp. today announced record revenue of $10.82 billion for the quarter ended December 31, 2004, a 7% increase over the results in the same period of the prior year. Operating income for the second quarter was $4.75 billion, which was an increase of $3.27 billion over the same period in the prior year...... "Our record revenue came from across-the-board strength in both our business and consumer segments," said John Connors, chief financial officer at Microsoft. "And our long-term approach to growing new businesses is paying off. Home and Entertainment delivered its first profitable...