Top 10 Stories

Retired Gen. Michael Flynn was paid $11,250 by Russia's top cybersecurity firm, Kaspersky, in 2015, according to new documents obtained and published by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Thursday. Flynn was also paid $11,250 by the Russian charter cargo airline Volga-Dnepr Airlines, according to the documents. Flynn was paid for his work with both companies while he still had top-secret-level security clearance, a year after he was fired as head of the Defense...

The leak of the 52.2 GB corporate database from business services firm Dun & Bradstreet contains millions of people's names, work email addresses, phone numbers, and the companies they work for along with their job titles, reports ZDNet. Dun & Bradstreet says the firm has not suffered a security breach, meaning the leak could have come from one of its thousands of customers. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Fast Company

Security experts have discovered a vulnerability in WhatsApp, that could have allowed hackers to take over “hundreds of millions” of users’ accounts and access everything in them.  The flaw was discovered by Check Point and reported to WhatsApp on 7 March. The company has since taken steps to fix the issue.It affected WhatsApp’s online platform, WhatsApp Web, which allows users to chat with their friends from a computer instead of their phone. View full story...

Emma Watson, the actress, is taking legal action after private photographs of her were stolen in a suspected hacking attack. The pictures of the Beauty And The Beast star show her trying on outfits during a fitting. But her spokesman, who could give no details on who stole the images, made it clear they did not show the actress nude - contrary to rumours circling online that she might have been the subject of a nude photo leak. He...

The need to recruit more women into cyber security has come under the spotlight at CyberUK as a study shows the UK infosec industry has one of the lowest proportions of women and the highest gender pay gaps in the world. Out-going GCHQ director Robert Hannigan has called on every UK organisation to do more to encourage women into the information security profession in the face of a growing skill shortage. View full story ORIGINAL...

Hackers have stolen 2.2 million email addresses and 287,000 cellphone numbers from Wishbone users, many of whom are young women under the age of 18. A popular social networking app that allows users to create and vote on simple two-choice quizzes lost millions of users records, including more than 2 million email addresses and full names, and almost 300,000 cellphone numbers. Unknown hackers apparently found an unprotected database for the app Wishbone and stole its...

Luckily, the flaws were fixed before hackers were able to find and exploit them. SAP has rushed to patch a zero-day security flaw in its HANA database platform before hackers had a chance to run riot with it. Security company Onapsis Research Labs originally uncovered the flaws that would have allowed hackers to compromise vulnerable database systems without the need for valid usernames and passwords. The cyber security flaws, now patched by SAP, include two SQL injection vulnerabilities...

A growing number of Twitter accounts including verified big-name brands, from Justin Bieber to Forbes Magazine, have been hacked to display Nazi symbols, a message written in Turkish and two hashtags that translate to "NaziGermany" and "NaziHolland." Compromised accounts so far include BBC North America, Reuters Japan, Forbes Magazine, Justin Bieber Japan, German newspaper Die Welt and cybersecurity commentator Graham Cluley. Many are now in the process of regaining access to their accounts. View full...

Google has said that it recently identified and shut down a massive ad fraud Android botnet called Chamois, which may have infected scores of Android devices. Google claimed that the botnet operated stealthily to infect users via the Play Store, without their knowledge, bombarding them with popup ads and automatically installing other apps in the background. Google security researchers said they chanced upon Chamois "during a routine ad traffic quality evaluation". According to Google, Chamois was "one of the largest" malware families seen...

Machine learning is one of the biggest buzzwords in cybersecurity in 2017. But a sufficiently smart adversary can exploit what the machine learning algorithm does, and reduce the quality of decision-making. Today's security threats have expanded in scope and seriousness. There can now be millions -- or even billions -- of dollars at risk when information security isn't handled properly. "The concern about this is that one might find that an adversary is able to...