Top 10 Stories

Cyber attacks are increasingly causing acrimonious fights between corporate victims and their insurance companies, raising questions about the value of policies offering protection against damage from hacking. Cyber insurance is a fast-growing market, with sales of policies growing by about 25 per cent a year according to a recent report from RBC Capital Markets. But as the business expands there are growing numbers of disputes. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: FT

Financial institutions in Singapore now have access to a S$30 million (US$21.88 million) grant that they can use to boost their cybersecurity operations and skillsets. Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) unveiled the new Cybersecurity Capabilities Grant that it said aimed to beef up the local financial sector's cyber resilience and help banks develop local cybersecurity talent. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: ZDNet

The records of 500 million customers of the hotel group Marriott International have been involved in a data breach. The hotel chain said the guest reservation database of its Starwood division had been compromised by an unauthorised party. It said an internal investigation found an attacker had been able to access the Starwood network since 2014. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: BBC

Today, the first ever worldwide Standards for the drone industry are being released by the International Standards Organisation (ISO)*. The new, long awaited Standards have been developed after several years of global collaboration between standards institutions from across the world and are expected to trigger rapid acceleration of growth within the drone industry as organisations throughout the world are galvanised to adopt drone technology against a new background of reassurance on safety and security. The...

BlackBerry Limited (NYSE: BB; TSX: BB) today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to wholly acquire Cylance, an artificial intelligence and cybersecurity leader, for US $1.4 billion in cash, plus the assumption of unvested employee incentive awards. Pending regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions, the deal is expected to close prior to the end of BlackBerry’s current fiscal year (February 2019). “Cylance’s leadership in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity will immediately complement our...

US rozzers are being warned to avoid looking at iPhones with Face ID in case they get locked out of the device, much like Craig Federighi at the iPhone X launch event. Apple's mug-scanning Face ID tech, found on the iPhone X and iPhone XS, attempts to authenticate a face up to five times before the feature is disabled and the user's potentially harder-to-obtain passcode is required to unlock the smartphone. Because of this, forensics outfit Elcomsoft is...

Researchers at IU have discovered a simple way to foil criminals intent on breaking into university data. To investigate the impact of policy on password reuse, the study analyzed password policies from 22 different U.S. universities, including their home institution, IU. Next, they extracted sets of emails and passwords from two large data sets that were published online and contained over 1.3 billion email addresses and password combinations. Based on email addresses belonging to a university’s domain,...

Scammers are creating fake Android cryptocurrency mining apps and promoting them on the Google Store. The kicker is that these apps claim to mine cryptocurrency that can't be mined in the first place. Fortinet discovered these apps on the Google Play Store when they saw that the apps were being promoted as miners for Ripple (XRP), Cardano (ADA), and Tether. As these are cryptocurrencies that are not possible to mine, the apps only pretend to mine and...

A malicious app called "Album by Google Photos" was found in the Microsoft Store today that pretends to be from Google. This app pretends to be part of Google Photos, but is actually an ad clicker that repeatedly opens hidden advertisements in Windows 10. This free Album by Google Photos app claims to be created by Google LLC and has a description of "Finally, a photos app that's as smart as you.".  You can see an image...

Just like clockwork, another weekend is over and Monday is here again. To lighten the load, El Reg is offering you the latest instalment of Who, Me?, our weekly sysadmin confessional column. This time we meet "Romeo", who was working at a large music company in London at the time in question. It was his first job for a big multinational and the firm had just been hit by the I Love You virus that crippled systems all over...