News

Researchers at the penetration testing specialists invested nearly £4,000 ($5,000) in high-end smart car alarms systems in order to put them to the test. Ken Munro, the founder of Pen Test Partners, explains that an advert by one of the vendors concerned and stating the system was unhackable had piqued interest initially. That's never a great claim to make as any security expert will tell you that there is no such thing as being 100% secure. Unsurprisingly,...

The security community has seen its share of mistakes made by cybercriminals and quickly took advantage to stop the threat. But some of them have reached blooper level. A phishing email caught recently delivered the victim not some sort of a malicious payload, as one would expect, but the executable of the legitimate PowerShell command line utility found in Windows operating system.To eliminate all confusion, the command line tool was the genuine one available in...

The number of confirmed data breaches during 2018 reached 12,449, a 424% increase when compared with 2017, 47% of all compromised identity records having been exposed in breaches experienced by organizations from the United States and China. 4IQ, the identity intelligence company which published this report on the breached data landscape and trends, also discovered that, while the number of breaches saw a substantial boost last year, the average breach sized decreased to 216,884 records, a value 4.7 times smaller than...

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that the company will rebuild many of its services around encryption and privacy. The changes will take years, Zuckerberg said, with the ultimate end-goal being the creation of a privacy-focused social platform that blends the community of a public social network with the intimacy and security of private messaging on WhatsApp.  Source: ZDNet

1 ,000 Americans were asked some fundamental questions about their personal cybersecurity. The results are both riveting and depressing. 17.6 percent of these Americans admitted that their identities had, indeed, been stolen. Only 17.6 percent, I hear you sniff. It seems that every day there's yet another security breach that releases millions of personal details to the underworld, the netherworld and the four corners of cyberworld.

Administrators of Cisco switches, firewalls, and security appliances are advised to take a look at the latest collection of security advisories published by the company, as chances are good they will need to implement some updates. None of the fixed vulnerabilities are critical or exploited in the wild, but most are high-risk and should be plugged as soon as possible. Source: Help Net Security

Organizations have long focused their cybersecurity positioning around prevention; however, with the sophistication and frequency of attacks increasing, more organizations are beginning to prioritize incident response teams, groups of specialists trained to address and defeat attacks that make it past existing protections. BAE Systems surveyed board level executives, IT decision makers, and information security professionals to understand the current state of corporate incident response capabilities and readiness. Organizations ranged from governmental agencies to healthcare and...

A UK charity set up to counter Russian disinformation has been targeted in a cyberattack.The National Crime Agency said it is leading an investigation into the theft of data from the government-funded Institute for Statecraft.The charity, which received £2m this financial year, has removed all content from its website while the investigation is ongoing. Source: Independent

More than 120,000 Health Alliance Plan (HAP) clients' personal and protected medical information may have been compromised in a security breach, the Detroit Free Press reported on Tuesday. Letters notifying customers of the breach were sent last week by Wolverine Solutions Group, a Detroit-based company HAP hired to manage its mailing services. The letters said the security problem occurred on or around Sept. 23, when Wolverine Solutions Group "experienced a ransomware incident—a malicious software that attacked and locked up our servers and workstations." Source: Fierce Healthcare

Mimecast Limited (NASDAQ: MIME), a leading email and data security company, today announced the latest Email Security Risk Assessment (ESRA) report, an aggregated analysis of tests that measure the efficacy of widely used email security systems. This quarter’s report found that email delivered with malicious URLs, a recently added part of the testing, has increased by more than 125 percent in comparison to last quarter’s results. The data was analyzed and, as in past periods,...