Top 10 Stories

  Telegraph: Whether it disrupts the Queen’s Christmas Day speech, a World Cup final penalty shoot-out or the results of The X Factor, the day when computer viruses infect television is around the corner, one of the world’s top technology security experts has warned. Eugene Kaspersky, the co-founder and chief executive of Russia’s Kaspersky Lab, the world’s fourth largest computer antivirus group, issued the alert in an interview with The Telegraph.  

Computerworld - Just days before Microsoft retired Windows XP from public support, the company drastically reduced the price of custom support agreements that give large companies and government agencies another year of XP patches, experts reported today. "I believe that Microsoft changed prices because it decided that not enough customers were enrolling in the program, and it was apprehensive of the ramifications of any Windows XP vulnerabilities," said Daryl Ullman, co-founder and managing director of the...

Infosecurity: In our Big Data era where the cloud, ubiquitous mobility and the all-digital economy form the hallmarks, information security has become ascendant. The area has almost certainly crossed the chasm from being seen as a necessary but niche IT function to something central to the viability of an organization. And with broader-ranging respect and a higher profile comes job satisfaction, apparently: new research has revealed that infosecurity professionals feel that there has never been...

  Wired: A federal appeals court has upheld a contempt citation against the founder of the defunct secure e-mail company Lavabit, finding that the weighty internet privacy issues he raised on appeal should have been brought up earlier in the legal process. The decision disposes of a closely watched privacy case on a technicality, without ruling one way or the other on the substantial issue: whether an internet company can be compelled to turn over...

SC Magazine: After issuing a community challenge on Friday, website performance and defense firm CloudFlare learned within 11 hours that private keys can be stolen using the Heartbleed bug – a critical vulnerability in widely used versions of the OpenSSL library that ultimately puts SSL/TLS encrypted communications at risk. Following a roughly weeklong analysis of the vulnerability, the experts with CloudFlare wanted to see just how susceptible vulnerable servers were to Heartbleed, so they set up an...

 Globe & Mail: A 19-year-old computer science student has been arrested by the RCMP and will face charges on allegations that he exploited the Heartbleed Internet vulnerability to steal confidential information from servers at the Canada Revenue Agency. The national police force acted quickly, stating that it received information on the alleged breach last Friday.  

  ZDNet: When I first read the claims by Bloomberg News that the NSA had access to the Heartbleed bug "for years" I was immediately suspicious. It had only been two years since the code had been released as part of OpenSSL. Yes, the NSA might have had it from earlier builds but it all sounded fishy, not least because it would have made them way more knowledgeable than they appear to be. Today I feel even...

Glendale Press: Jurors have started deliberating in the case of a Glendale man accused of bank fraud and stealing the identities of hundreds of 99 Cents Only store customers. Glendale resident Rafael Parsadanyan is one of three men, including Mher Darbinyan and Arman Sharopetrosian, on trial for their roles in the fraud schemes, which were reportedly tied to an organized crime ring called Armenian Power.  

Huffington Post: Some people worry that certain companies have access to too much of our personal information, and they question the use those companies sometimes make of that data. Such worries should not be dismissed altogether, but objectively speaking, governments are by far the greater threat to our privacy, as recent spying scandals amply demonstrate. And because of these scandals, privacy watchdogs are finally starting to pay more attention to the privacy threat posed by...

  Register: Tor, the sometimes-controversial internet-traffic-anonymising service, is bleeding thanks to Heartbleed. Roger Dingledine, one of Tor's three original co-developers and now the project's leader, director and researcerh, has posted to the Tor relays mailing lists with his assessment that “we'll lose about 12% of the exit capacity and 12% of the guard capacity.”