Top 10 Stories

The National Security Agency’s (NSA) lead lawyer in a recent speech made the case for creating one federal agency to spearhead the government’s cybersecurity efforts. View full story Original source: The Hill

The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, asked the Justice Department this weekend to publicly reject President Trump’s assertion that President Barack Obama ordered the tapping of Mr. Trump’s phones, senior American officials said on Sunday. Mr. Comey has argued that the highly charged claim is false and must be corrected, they said, but the department has not released any such statement. View full story Original source: New York Times

People out to grab other people’s money -- whether collecting a debt or posing as a government agent -- topped the nation’s list of consumer woes in 2016. View full story Original source: ABC News

Consumer Reports, an influential U.S. non-profit group that conducts extensive reviews of cars, kitchen appliances and other goods, is gearing up to start considering cyber security and privacy safeguards when scoring products. View full story Original source: Yahoo

A unique attack called DNSMessenger uses DNS queries to carry out malicious PowerShell commands on compromised computers, a method that researchers said makes it difficult to detect that a remote access Trojan is being dropped onto targeted systems. View full story Original source: Threatpost

Amazon has blamed a typo for a massive cloud-computing outage which caused problems for thousands of websites and apps. The web giant has apologised for the five-hour outage of some Amazon Web Services which took down websites including Slack, Trello and Medium. Amazon has now revealed exactly what went wrong, explaining that an incorrectly typed command during a routine debugging of its billing system was to blame, also known as a fat finger typo.  The employee...

New research published Beaming, a business ISP, reveals that more than half (52 percent) of British businesses fell victim to some form of cyber-crime in 2016. Beaming's study, which was conducted by researchers at Opinium, indicates that 2.9 million UK firms suffered cyber-security breaches nationwide last year, at a cost of £29.1 billion. Computer viruses and phishing attacks were the most common corporate cyber-threats faced by British businesses last year, in both cases impacting 23...

Nearly 80,000 patients were potentially impacted by a recent data breach at Georgia-based Emory Healthcare’s Orthopaedics & Spine Center and Brain Health Center (EHC) at Emory Clinic. On January 3, 2017, EHC became aware of an incident of unauthorized data access involving a third party database called Waits & Delays. The healthcare organization explained in an online statement it had used the database to update patients on appointment information. The database—which contained appointment information including patient names,...

A ransomware variant which has been relatively inactive for almost two years is back, and this time it's stealing user credentials from victims in addition to demanding a ransom to unencrypt locked files. TorrentLocker -- also known as Cryptolocker -- started targeting Windows users in 2014 before dropping off by the summer of 2015. Like the majority of ransomware schemes, TorrentLocker spreads via spam email messages containing malicious attachments. This revived TorrentLocker campaign sees targets sent an...

Vice-president Mike Pence used a personal email account to discuss security issues as governor of Indiana and was hacked last summer, it was reported on Thursday. Pence’s AOL account was compromised by a scammer who sent an email to his contacts claiming Pence and his wife had been attacked on their way back to their hotel in the Philippines, losing their money, bank cards and mobile phone, the Indianapolis Star reported. “In response, Pence sent an email to...