Top 10 Stories

Robots will soon be cleaning our homes, performing surgery and even building skyscrapers. But a top security firm claims that robots – including those currently on the market – could attack humans, burgle homes and wreak havoc on a factory floor. There have already been serious accidents including a bride-to-be who was crushed to death by a robot just two weeks before she was due to marry the love of her life. A robot cannon also killed nine soldiers and...

Shoppers of 40 online stores have had their bank card numbers and addresses slurped by a malware infection at backend provider Aptos. The security breach occurred late last year when a crook was able to inject spyware into machines Aptos used to host its retail services for online shops. This software nasty was able to access customer payment card numbers and expiration dates, full names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses, we're told. Rather than being alerted...

Nearly half of consumers expressed interest in biometrics and other forms of authentication to deliver enhanced security in a new survey commissioned by payments firm Mastercard. The company’s Mastercard Digital Payments Study found that 43 percent of respondents wanted to know more about biometrics and other forms of authentication. Mastercard wrote that New developments in facial recognition and fingerprint and touch authentication drove over half of biometric/authentication conversations  at 51 percent. View full story ORIGINAL...

The Boeing Co. has traced a recent data breach involving personal information of 36,000 of its workers to an employee who sought help formatting a spreadsheet from their spouse, which resulted in the company losing control of the information for a period of time late last year. According to a report from the Puget Sound Business Journal, Boeing (NYSE: BA) says it has done forensic testing of both the employee’s and the spouse’s computers to confirm any copies of...

Yahoo!'s board has decided CEO Marissa Mayer should not be paid her bonus, after investigating the 2014 hack that has so besmirched the company's reputation and finding the company knew about the gravity of the situation but failed to act properly to address the situation. Mayer has also decided to forego an award of equity due to her this year. News of the decisions and Yahoo!'s investigation into the hacks emerged today with the publication...

Password management applications, recommended by many security experts as the only viable way to deal with large sets of passwords that are unique and sufficiently complex, introduce their own set of problems – namely the general fallibility of software. A group of security researchers called TeamSIK from the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology (SIT) in Darmstadt, Germany, on Tuesday published its security assessment of nine popular password management applications on Android devices and found them all...

The ICO has slapped a health firm with a £200,000 fine for emailing audio recordings of outpatient letters in an unencrypted format, the transcripts of which were then searchable online via an insecure FTP server. The ICO issued the fine to the HCA International Ltd after it was alerted to the fact the transcripts of outpatients letters could be found online. The audio recordings were sent to a company in India for transcribing before being...

The spate of cyberattacks conducted against Polish banking interests earlier this month and tentatively linked to a Russian cybercriminal gang may have in fact been conducted by a different group who attempted dodge blame and frame the Russians with a false flag operation. A Trend Micro report stated it is connecting the Lazarus group to that attacks that saw the Ratankba ransomware being used, dismissing the idea it was a Russian group behind the attacks.  The company pointed to...

Despite work by Congress to pass more than 50 laws to address cybersecurity, the federal government's track record in securing its own information-technology systems is far from sterling. This could be seen most obviously in the hack of the Office of Personnel Management that compromised 21.5 million government records and in the 2015 hack of the Internal Revenue Service, which exposed the information of at least 724,000 taxpayers to bad actors. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: The Hill

Bad news from malware-land after security researchers from IBM reported today they'd discovered the first samples of version 4.0 of the infamous and highly-active Dridex banking trojan. One of the lesser known things about computer viruses is the fact that malware is very similar to normal software, often going through the same development cycles and receiving constant updates. While most malware operators strive to keep as much of their source code and operational details hidden,...