Top 10 Stories

Dark Reading - The NSA's catalog of custom hacking tools for popular networking and consumer products recently leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden provided a rare glimpse at the arsenal at the fingertips of the spy agency's hackers. But the tools were not unlike many techniques and weapons employed by criminals or other espionage cyberattackers, experts say. Take DROPOUT JEEP, the NSA-built hacking tool included in its recently published catalog in 2008 that hacks iPhones. DROPOUT JEEP...

Softpedia - EZTV, the popular TV torrent distribution group, is currently down. The website has been the target of a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. Some of the site’s users have been wondering if EZTV has suffered the same fate as the original isoHunt, which was shut down in October 2013, after its owners reached an agreement with the MPAA.

Security Week - As SecurityWeek reported, Yahoo announced this week that all Yahoo Mail communications—whether on the Web, mobile Web, mobile apps, or even via IMAP, POP and SMTP—would be encrypted by default using 2,048-bit certificates. This move will protect all the contents of emails, attachments, contacts, Calendar information, and even Messenger data, as they move between the user's browser and Yahoo's servers. On the surface, the fact that Yahoo! finally enabled HTTPS encryption for all Yahoo Mail...

Techworld - Iranian claims that hackers broke into servers belonging to the Israeli Airports Authority (IAA) and stole sensitive data including flight plans have been dismissed by a local security expert as part of a bogus attempt to conduct “psychological warfare”. On Wednesday, the pro-Government FARS news agency quoted claims made by the shadowy Islamic Cyber Resistance Group (ICRG) on its website (not currently available) that it had breached iaa.gov.il servers for several months, extracting enough important...

Net Security - Users of popular Bitcoin exchanges are being actively targeted by cyber crooks looking to syphon funds out of their digital wallets. When cyber crooks are looking to infect as many Internet users with Bitcoin mining software, they usually start a wide-reaching, generic spam campaign. But when they are after specific users' Bitcoins, they use a more targeted approach.

Softpedia - 31-year-old Jonathan Hartwell Wolberg of Tucson, Arizona, worked as a system administrator at a cloud computing servicesprovider in the Eastern District of Virginia. After quitting his job, he continued to access the firm’s systems without authorization. Authorities say that between March 16 and August 1, 2012, the man not only shut down a key data server, but also encouraged the company’s customers to leave.

The Register - It’s not just the NSA that’s said to be working on a quantum computer – China is also pulling out all the stops to beat its arch rival with a crypto-cracking machine of its own. The National Natural Science Foundation of China funded 90 quantum-based projects in 2013, with the order from Beijing to get the job done irrespective of the cost, according to South China Morning Post.

The Register - Your wishes have been granted: Google has quietly added a new "feature" to Gmail that allows anyone with a Google+ account to send you email even if they don't know your actual webmail address. Over the next few days, Gmail users with Google+ accounts will start seeing names from their Google+ circles suggested as potential recipients when they start typing in the "To" field of new email messages. By default, "anyone on...

BBC - Adverts on Yahoo's homepage were infected with malware designed to mine the Bitcoin virtual currency, according to security experts. Yahoo confirmed that for a four-day period in January, malware was served in ads on its homepage.

Arstechnica - Miscreants who earlier this week took down servers for League of Legends, EA.com, and other online game services used a never-before-seen technique that vastly amplified the amount of junk traffic directed at denial-of-service targets. Rather than directly flooding the targeted services with torrents of data, an attack group calling itself DERP Trolling sent much smaller-sized data requests to time-synchronization servers running theNetwork Time Protocol (NTP). By manipulating the requests to make them appear as if they originated...