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The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has proposed an independent watchdog that will write a "code of practice" for tech companies which would see Internet sites be fined or blocked if they fail to tackle "online harms" such as terrorist propaganda and child abuse. Senior managers could be held liable for breaches, with a possible levy on the industry to fund the regulator. Source: BBC

New variants of the sextortion scams are now attaching password protected zip files that contain alleged proof that the sender has a video recording of the recipient. While you cannot view the individual files in the archive, you can see what they are named, which can cause recipients to become scared enough to make a payment. This new sextortion variant was first reported by security site MyOnlineSecurity and is utilising email subjects like "RE: Case...

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has fined Newham Council £145,000 for inadvertently releasing the details of 200 people residing in its area who featured on a police database with a link to gang crime. The details were disclosed from the Metropolitan Police Service Gangs Matrix database when an employee sent the personal details in an attachment to 44 recipients, with both redacted and unredacted versions of the data. Source: IT Pro

For the past three months, a cybercrime group has been hacking into home routers --mostly D-Link models-- to change DNS server settings and hijack traffic meant for legitimate sites and redirect it to malicious clones. The attackers operate by using well-known exploits in router firmware to hack into vulnerable devices and make silent changes to the router's DNS configuration, changes that most users won't ever notice. Source: ZDNet

Check Point's research team tried the April Fools snake game added by Google inside the Android and iOS Google Maps apps and, after failing to play it for as long as they wanted, they reverse engineered it, stuck an auto-play AI inside, and removed the "loss" factor altogether.This happened because they were too busy researching cyber threats all day long to keep playing it for hours on end.Seriously though, they just decided to hack it...

Nearly half (48%) of all malicious files detected in the past 12 months were some kind of document, an email analysis by researchers at Barracuda Networks has revealed. More than 300,000 unique malicious documents were identified in the study, which researchers said indicates an alarming rise in the use of document-based malware.This trend appears to be gaining momentum, with 59% of all malicious files detected in the first quarter of 2019 being documents, compared with...

A recent investigation by virtualization company Bromium has discovered that US-based web servers were being used by cybercriminals to host and distribute banking trojans, information stealers and ransomware.The firm analyzed its own threat data as well as public data between May 2018 and March 2019 to reveal that malicious threats were originating from web servers in Las Vegas, Nevada registered under the name PONYNET and hosted on BuyVM data centers.BuyVM is actually owned by FranTech...

The ultrasonic fingerprint scanner feature in the Samsung Galaxy S10 can be duped into unlocking the device with the help of a 3D printed fingerprint stolen from its owner as shown by Reddit user darkshark9.According to Samsung's description, to use the in-screen fingerprint scanner one only has to "Simply touch the glass to unlock. We've moved security from the back of the phone to the front, fusing the Ultrasonic Fingerprint directly into the screen." Source:...

The smartphone video game Flappy Bird was removed from smartphones in 2014 by its creator, Dong Nguyen, because it was too addictive. But the program lives on as an inspiration to deep learning researchers. Specifically, International Business Machines scientists this week unveiled research into how machines can continually learn tasks, including playing Flappy Bird, improving over time rather than learning one level of play and stopping at that.Known as lifelong learning, or continuous learning, the...

NSA today finally released the complete source code for GHIDRA version 9.0.2 which is now available on its Github repository.GHIDRA is agency's home-grown classified software reverse engineering tool that agency experts have been using internally for over a decade to hunt down security bugs in software and applications.GHIDRA is a Java-based reverse engineering framework that features a graphical user interface (GUI) and has been designed to run on a variety of platforms including Windows, macOS,...