Top 10 Stories

Germany's military will launch a cyber command next week as part of an effort to beef up online defences at a time when German spy agencies are warning of increasing cyber attacks by Russia. The German military remains a high-value target for hackers, with some 284,000 complex and professional would-be attacks registered in the first nine weeks of 2017, a ministry spokesman said. No damage had been reported thus far, he added. Cyber attacks on militaries are...

The US Department of Justice announced yesterday that Maxim Senakh, 41, of Velikii Novgorod, Russia, pleaded guilty for his role in the creation of the Ebury malware and for maintaining its infamous botnet. US authorities indicted Senakh in January 2015, and the law enforcement detained the hacker in Finland in August of the same year. Finland approved Senakh's extradition to the US in January 2016, but not without the classic rhetoric from Russian authorities who...

In 2016, more than 4 billion records were leaked worldwide, exceeding the combined total from the two previous years, according to a report from IBM Security. In its IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2017, Big Blue explained the leaked documents comprised the usual credit cards, passwords, and personal health information, but also noted a shift in cybercriminal strategies, finding a number of significant breaches were related to unstructured data such as email archives, business documents, intellectual...

The European Commission will in June push for backdoor access to encryption used by apps, according to EU Justice Commissioner Věra Jourová. Speaking publicly, and claiming that she has been pushed by politicians across Europe, Jourová said that she will outline "three or four options" that range from voluntary agreements by business to strict legislation. The EC's goal is to provide the police with a "swift and reliable" way to discover what users of encrypted apps have...

The Smart Home era just got even more connected with the launch of smart lighting from the Swedish home-goods giant Ikea. But the future may not be bright for smart light bulbs as cyber security experts have warned hackers might be able to get into the devices. The TRÅDFRI LED bulbs, which cost between $20 -$25 (£16 - £20), can be adjusted using a smartphone to produce different lighting levels. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Daily...

The German parliament was the target of fresh cyber attacks in January that attempted to piggy-back on an Israeli newspaper site to target politicians in Germany, Berlin's cyber security watchdog said on Wednesday. Cyber defenses installed after a 2015 hack of the parliament helped avert the attempted breaches, the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) said in a statement. The hackers appeared to use advertising running on the Jerusalem Post website to redirect users to...

Apple has resolved a certification validation vulnerability affecting both macOS and iOS users. The (CVE-2017-2485) vulnerability posed a remote code execution risk on affected systems, which created a potential mechanism for hackers to craft exploits that pushed malware on to otherwise patched iThings. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: The Register

The U.S. electrical grid could be hacked -- and security experts want the Trump administration to make it a lot harder for attackers to turn off America's lights. MIT released a report Tuesday calling for an overhaul of infrastructure cybersecurity. The authors -- led by Joel Brenner, senior research fellow at MIT and former head of U.S. counterintelligence -- want the administration to take more effective action on securing critical systems we use every day. View full...

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have been marketed as game-changing technologies amid the climbing number of breaches, increased prevalence of non-malware attacks and the waning efficacy of legacy antivirus (AV). Yet doubts still persist, especially when they’re used in siloes. For now, it appears to be a fledgling space. According to Carbon Black’s Behind the Hype report on the subject, nearly two-thirds (64%) of security researchers said they’ve seen an increase in non-malware attacks since...

Networking giant, Cisco, has advised governments and organisations on the need to demonstrate huge security capabilities, having discovered dramatic increase in spam volume as well as huge server vulnerabilities.In its 2017 Annual Cybersecurity Report (ACR), which also showed the true cost of cybercrime, Cisco informed that attackers now launch more attacks against servers. Attacks on server can run the company or organisation down by making hitherto closed information available to attackers; this is even as...