Top 10 Stories

An attack on US government facilities in Alaska has been traced back to China's Tsinghua University and a larger hacking effort. Researchers with security house Recorded Future say  that the attack, initially focused on seperatist activity in Tibet, grew to to target US government operations in the Pacific including bases in Alaska. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: The Register

A teenage boy from Australia has pleaded guilty to hacking into Apple's network and downloading internal files, according to reports. The 16-year-old accessed 90 gigabytes worth of files, breaking into the system many times over the course of a year from his suburban home in Melbourne, reports The Age newspaper. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: BBC

DDoS attack volumes have increased by 50% to an average of 3.3 Gbps during May, June and July 2018, compared to 2.2 Gbps during the previous quarter, according to Link11. Attacks are also becoming increasingly complex, with 46% of incidents using two or more vectors. View Full Story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Helpnetsecurity

Almost a third of U.K. businesses said they had been hit by cryptocurrency mining malware within the previous month, according to new research. In a survey published by Citrix, almost 60 percent of responding companies further indicated they had found mining malware on their systems at some time in the past, with the vast majority of those instances (around 80 percent) being in the last six months. View Full Story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Coin Desk

Google has added a section to its twice-yearly transparency report to show who buys U.S. election ads on its platform and how much money is spent on political advertising, the search engine giant said on Wednesday. The move follows similar steps from Twitter (TWTR.N) and Facebook (FB.O) in late June, as social media platforms face the threat of U.S. regulation over the lack of disclosure on such spending. View Full Story  ORIGINAL SOURCE: Reuters

A security plug-in for the Firefox browser is under fire after users discovered it was collecting and uploading their online activity. The outcry began after Mozilla featured the Web Security extension on its blog with a post titled "Make Your Firefox Browser a Privacy Superpower." The plug-in, developed by German company Creative Software Solutions, bills itself as a tool for blocking malicious pages and phishing sites. View Full Story ORIGINAL SOURCE: The Register

Google has patched a vulnerability in the Chrome browser that allows an attacker to retrieve sensitive information from other sites via audio or video HTML tags. Ron Masas, a security researcher with Imperva, discovered and reported this issue —tracked as CVE-2018-6177— to Google. The browser maker fixed the security hole at the end of July with the release of Chrome v68.0.3440.75. View Full Story  ORIGINAL SOURCE: Bleeping Computer

The Israeli government said on Wednesday it is investing 90 million shekels ($24 million) to shore up the country’s cyber security industry as a global leader. Under the three-year program companies dealing with high-risk research and development will be eligible to receive up to 5 million shekels a year. The program will also help fund pilot projects in Israel and abroad. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Reuters  

This was revealed in a survey based on numerous interviews with senior staff in the security and IT functions of companies with more than 500 employees in the UK and ten other countries. It found that only 38% of UK firms surveyed have cyber security insurance that covers all risks. While most respondents said that their cyber insurance is not based on an accurate assessment of their firm’s individual risk. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Information...

Apple works hard to make its software secure. Beyond primary protections that prevent malware infections in the first place, company engineers also build a variety of defense-in-depth measures that are designed to lessen the damage that can happen once a Mac is compromised. Now, Patrick Wardle, a former National Security Agency hacker and macOS security expert has exposed a major shortcoming that generically affects many of these secondary defenses. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Ars...