Top 10 Stories

Britain’s energy companies were hacked on the day of the General Election by computer criminals believed to have been backed by Russia. The Government’s electronic spy agency GCHQ said in an official report sent to the energy sector that companies “are likely to have been compromised” in the wake of the attack launched on June 8. The report accuses “state-sponsored hostile threat actors” of being responsible for the cyber attack, which may also have targeted water companies and the manufacturing...

Britain's National Cyber Security Centre said on Tuesday it had never certified products from Russian cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab. "The NCSC certifies products through a range of initiatives, and vendors apply to have their products certified via one of our accredited lab partners," the NCSC, which is part of Britain's GCHQ eavesdropping security agency, said. "We certify products through a range of initiatives, but the NCSC has never had products listed from Kaspersky," it...

It has been reported that the cyber security office in the State Department may be closed as its top diplomat quits. Christopher Painter, the Coordinator for Cyber Issues, is leaving his post at the end of the month after well over two decades of leadership on the issue, per Politico. The news outlet also reported that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson may shut down Mr Painter’s office, which is responsible for “negotiating joint agreements with other...

The sensitive personal and financial details of nearly 2.2 million Dow Jones & Co. customers were inadvertently exposed due to a configuration error on a cloud storage server, the publication confirmed on Monday. The exposed data included the names, addresses, account information, email addresses and last four digits of credit card numbers of millions of customers, including Wall Street Journal and Barron's subscribers, were accessible online to anyone who had an Amazon Web Services account....

A new Android RAT (Remote Access Trojan) detected under the name of GhostCtrl can lock mobile device by resetting their PIN and display a ransom note to infected victims. These ransomware capabilities have been observed in the source code of GhostCtrl, but not in real-world infections, where the RAT was mostly used for its data exfiltration capabilities. The GhostCtrl RAT was discovered by Trend Micro researchers part of a wave of attacks against Israeli healthcare...

The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), a division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), has issued a public service announcement about the improper security and privacy protections provided by manufacturers of Internet-connected smart toys, also known as IoT toys. The IC3 issues such advisories when it spots trends of abuse in a specific area of technology. It's most recent warning comes after numerous incidents where insecure smart toys have leaked the personal details of small children,...

Over the weekend, Emsisoft security researcher xXToffeeXx discovered a new ransomware called Reyptson that is targeting Spanish victims. Since then, we have seen increased activity in the ransomware's developmen. Today security researcher MalwareHunterTeam took a deeper look and noticed that Reyptson conducts its own spam distribution campaign directly from a victim's configured Thunderbird email account. View Full Story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Bleeping Computer

Around 9 a.m. eastern time on Monday, Shawn Van de Vyver, a dentist in Michigan, went to CoinDash's website to check out the project's initial coin offering — a new way that cryptocurrency start-ups are raising money. Van de Vyver has been building computers and websites for 20 years and started studying bitcoin when it was trading in the single digits (it's now priced at more than $2,000). He also invested a couple thousand dollars...

An extraordinary stand-off has emerged between the State’s official statistics body and the data protection watchdog over a plan by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) to force mobile phone network providers to hand over roaming data about tourists and Irish residents travelling abroad. View Full Story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Irish Times

Dating site for cheaters Ashley Madison has thrown US$11.2 million on the bed to make its 2015 data leak go away. View Full Story ORIGINAL SOURCE: The Register