Top 10 Stories

In the digital world we live in, technologies are rapidly evolving. Cyber threats are not lagging behind. While developers build more and more complex programs, hackers find new, smarter ways to attack. New threats can break connections that were considered highly secure until recently. One specific and recent example are the so-called cross-protocol attacks. They make it possible for attackers to get access to very sensitive information like passwords, emails and financial data. View full...

In the first two weeks of April, sudden spikes of traffic started hitting gaming and gambling sites in Hong Kong. The increased rush weren’t anxious gamers looking to place bets, but a DDoS attack designed to take the sites offline. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: IBTimes

Four researchers from two universities in Germany have devised a method of turning an antivirus engine’s malware scanning engine into an attack weapon. The attack is centered around malware signatures, an old malware identification technique that relies on filters to look for patterns inside the bytes of a file. These malware signatures are created by malware analysts who study malware samples and create a signature to be used by the antivirus (AV) engine. View full...

Android is the most widely used mobile platform on the planet. More than 1.4 billion people use an Android smartphone or tablet every single day, and the fact that it’s open source and free for manufacturers to use is a big part of that popularity. But openness is a double-edged sword: It has led to a situation where many Android phones are not regularly updated with the latest security patches. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE:...

This month we will also explore the dangers of phishing scams and hardware vulnerabilities. Let’s also recap the Java update which was part of the Oracle CPU the week after April Patch Tuesday for those who may not have updated it yet. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Help Net Security

A specialist in cybersecurity told the Wall Street Journal that digital fingerprints left behind by a hacker on emails and documents belonging to new French President Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche party show ties to the Kremlin. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Rawstory

A known security flaw in the Signaling System 7 (SS7) protocol, which controls the way mobiles exchange calls and text messages across the globe, has been used by cyber criminals to  crack into the  European bank accounts. According to German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung the vulnerability was exploited in January  and used to bypass the two-factor authentication European banks were using to secure access to customer accounts. The attackers were able to use SS7 to redirect...

Greater Manchester Police (GMP) has been fined £150,000 ($194,000) by the UK's data breach watchdog – the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) – after three unencrypted DVDs containing footage of interviews with victims of violent and sexual crimes were "lost in the post". The department sent the footage in 2015 to the Serious Crime Analysis Section (SCAS), a division of the National Crime Agency (NCA), by recorded delivery but they were never received. The DVDs, stored...

The UK government is planning to push greater surveillance powers that would force internet providers to monitor communications in near-realtime and install backdoor equipment to break encryption, according to a leaked document. Provisions in proposals show that the government is asking for powers to compel internet providers to turn over the realtime communications of a person "in an intelligible form," including encrypted content, within one working day. To that end, internet providers will be forced...

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency expects new cyber attacks targeting politicians and government officials ahead of federal elections. Hans-Georg Maassen, head of the BfV agency, said spies are keeping a “very close watch” on threats as the country gears up for September’s vote. “We expect further attacks, and we are keeping a very close watch on the threats,” Mr Maassen told a cyber security conference in Potsdam. “We are finding increasingly aggressive cyber espionage.” He said...