Editor's News

Guardians of Peace, the hackers who have terrorised Sony Pictures, have halted their actions after the cinema release of The Interview was suspended.   According to CNN, the hackers sent an email to executives at the company, crediting them for a "very wise" decision to cancel the Christmas day release of the film. The company believes the email is legitimate as it followed a pattern of previous messages, sent to a list of particular executives...

Three-quarters of consumers are aware of the risks of visiting a website, but only a third look for the green address bar.   According to research of 6,000 consumers by GlobalSign, 20 per cent of those surveyed think that the internet is a completely unsafe place, but do take into account other factors to assess the trustworthiness of a website, such as how quickly the site loads and works (43 per cent), whether the site...

The Sony Pictures hackers reportedly gained access to Sony’s systems by obtaining the login credentials of a high-level systems administrator.   According to CNN, an anonymous US official who was reportedly privy to government briefings on the topic of the Sony hack, said that once they got these credentials, they were granted the “keys to the entire building”   Trey Ford, global security strategist at Rapid7 noted that when the attack was first reported, it was...

Accumuli Security has completed the acquisition of RandomStorm for £8.9 million.   Accumuli, a specialist in IT security and risk management has acquired the west Yorkshire-based integrated information security specialist, to compliment and strengthen Accumuli’s solutions and services framework.   Gavin Lyons, CEO of Accumuli, said: “RandomStorm is a business which has excelled in providing market leading integrated information security solutions and services to help its customers manage IT risk and implement security best practice. Their expertise...

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has admitted that a spear phishing attack hit its centralised zone data system (CZDS).   In an update, ICANN said that the attacker obtained administrative access to all files in the CZDS, including copies of the zone files in the system, information entered by users such as name, postal address, email address, fax and telephone numbers, usernames and password.   “Although the passwords were stored as...

Sony Pictures has said that there will be no theatrical release for The Interview, as the US has claimed that North Korea was “centrally involved” in the hacking of Sony Pictures computers.   According to a statement issued to Variety, Sony Pictures said that it has decided not to move forward with the planned December 25th theatrical release of the film, after a number of cinemas decided not to show the film The Interview on safety...

Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel has said that he is “definitely angry” and “definitely devastated” after details of a business deal between the mobile app and Sony were revealed.   Leaked emails revealed that Snapchat had acquired a company focused on wearable tech similar to Google Glass and a QR code-scanning company, and there was some insight into Snapchat's rejection of Facebook’s reported $3 billion failed acquisition.   In an open letter, Siegel said: “Keeping secrets means coming home...

Airline tickets for Delta can be altered with a simple URL change   According to research, you can simply change the URL of your boarding pass and get someone else’s boarding pass, even if they’re on a different airline. As well as a potential data privacy angle, this would allow any passenger to change to a different flight.   Tod Beardsley, engineering manager at Rapid7, said that this is a “classic information leak in web design”....

Only 570 of 40,000 European victims of ransomware paid the Bitcoin fee.   Infecting more than 40,000 systems in Europe, TorrentLocker started spreading in early 2014 and encrypted documents, pictures and other files on user’s device, with a demand of up to 4.081 Bitcoins to unlock it, around £950.   ESET's research found that 2.329 UK systems had been infected, and around ten per cent (up to 210) had paid the ransom. Commonly, the ransom...

A new bug in Linux has been detected which bypasses the “Wheel” group of advanced permissions. According to detection by Alert Logic, the bug is seasonally called “grinch” and impacts all Linux platforms, including mobile devices. Stephen Coty, chief security evangelist at Alert Logic, said that grinch exists in the new authorisation system that allows privilege escalation through Wheel; a user group that is used on Linux systems to control access to su (superuser) commands....