Cyber Bites

Users of Telegram Messengers in certain parts of the world had trouble exchanging messages through the service yesterday. The problems were caused by a distributed denial-of-service attack aiming at Telegram servers. The service outage affected users mainly in South and North America, although connection issues were present in other parts of the world as well. In a Twitter announcement, Telegram informed that its servers today were the target of a DDoS attack deployed by a...

The Irish regulator conducting nearly one dozen investigations into Facebook isn’t convinced by Mark Zuckerberg’s privacy push. The internet giant’s stock fell Wednesday after a report in the Wall Street Journal suggested the Facebook boss has previously been aware of potential issues with privacy, arising from the firm’s business practices. In a CNBC interview Wednesday, Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner Helen Dixon said “it’s all going to remain to be seen” whether Facebook and CEO Mark...

The well-known and respected data breach notification website “Have I Been Pwned” is up for sale. Troy Hunt, its founder and sole operator, announced the sale on Tuesday in a blog post where he explained why the time has come for Have I Been Pwned to become part of something bigger and more organized. Source: VICE

In a Facebook post, Radiohead wrote, "We got hacked last week -- someone stole Thom's minidisk archive from around the time of OK Computer, and reportedly demanded $150,000 on threat of releasing it." Rather than paying up, Radiohead posted the hours of unreleased audio on Bandcamp, and it'll be available for the next 18 days. It's free to stream and costs about $22 to download. The proceeds will go to Extinction Rebellion, a UK group...

Spanish soccer league La Liga has been fined for inappropriately using its app to catch illegal streaming. The Spanish data protection agency charged La Liga with a fine of 250 thousand euros for violating several EU laws on transparency and data privacy, and ordered the app's removal by June 30th. The popular app -- used by over four million in Spain for displaying game results -- was found to be tapping into the location data...

Evite, a social planning and e-invitations service, and one of the biggest sites on the Internet, has officially admitted to a security breach that ZDNet first reported back in April. Evite said the malicious intruder stole "an inactive data storage file" that was holding information on some Evite user accounts. According to the company, the file -- which appears to have been an old backup -- didn't store "user information more recent than 2013." Source:...

A Google security expert today revealed that an unpatched issue in the main cryptographic library of Microsoft's operating system can cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition in Windows 8 servers and above. The problem is in SymCrypt, the primary library for implementing symmetric cryptographic algorithms in Windows 8 and also for asymmetric ones starting with Windows 10 version 1703. Source: Bleeping Computer

Dozens of U.S. government websites appear to contain a flaw enabling anyone to generate URLs with their domains that redirect users to external sites, a handy tool for criminals hoping to infect users with malware or fool them into surrendering personal information. Source: Gizmodo

A sophisticated scam is targeting Gmail users through fraudulent, unsolicited Google Calendar notifications as well as through other Google services, including Photos and Forms, according to Kaspersky. In these scams, criminals are exploiting Gmail calendar’s default feature that automatically adds calendar invitations and notifications. Source: Infosecurity Magazine

Lake City was targeted by a malware attack. The ransomware known as "Triple Threat" combines three methods of attack to targeted systems. Many city systems are out of order. All email systems are inoperable. Most land-lines are also out of order. All emergency services, including police and fire, remain intact. Source: WCJB