Top 10 Stories

Marissa Mayer, the CEO of perennial drain-circler Yahoo!, will step down from its board of directors, along with five other members, after Verizon finishes gobbling up most of the internet portal. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: The Register

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights (OCR), has announced the first Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) settlement based on the untimely reporting of a breach of unsecured protected health information (PHI).  Presence Health has agreed to settle potential violations of the HIPAA Breach Notification Rule by paying $475,000 and implementing a corrective action plan. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Databreaches.net

Based on statistical data gathered by Sucuri from 7,937 compromised websites, WordPress, Joomla, and Magento, in this order, continued to be the most hacked CMS platforms in the third quarter of 2016 (months of July, August, and September). View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Bleeping Computer

Recent variants of the "Merry Christmas" ransomware, also known as Merry X-Mas, are also dropping the DiamondFox malware on infected computers, which is used by the ransomware's operators to collect data from infected hosts, such as passwords, sensitive files, and others. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Bleeping Computer

That’s right. Millions of computer users around the world face being blocked from the internet at some point in 2017 as the global network shuts down for 24 hours. This dire prediction comes from US technology security vendor LogRhythm. The company’s chief information security officer and VP James Carder told Business Insider that it won’t just be a technical issue, but more likely the work of sophisticated criminal minds. He said: ‘In 2017, we’re going...

UK’s largest domain registrar provider 123-reg has become a victim of a DDoS attack after which its users couldn’t access their email accounts as well as websites. This is only the beginning of 2017 and the hosting platform has suffered another big blow. The news about these attack was announced formally by the company via Twitter: “We believe a DDoS attack has just started, we are working out remediation options and impact at present. Updates...

Video game giant Square Enix's European Twitter account was hacked early on Friday (6 December) by a group of hackers calling themselves the "cyberwolfgang". The attackers posted a series of vicious racist and homophobic messages on the platform. During the three-hour-long breach, the hackers targeted the Square Enix Europe's follower counts by unfollowing users and blocking the company's followers en masse, causing the account's follower count to plummet from over 151,000 down to about 50,000....

If you managed to get your hands on the Mini NES this holiday season, you may already be tired of the 30 classic games pre-installed on the system by now. Nintendo has made clear that the tiny replica NES will not officially receive new games, especially with no WiFi protocol to download them. But that hasn't stopped budding hackers from scoffing at Nintendo's claims and adding games their own way. This week saw separate hackers in Japan and...

British intelligence reportedly provided a vital tipoff to the US in 2015 about the extent of Russian hacking on the presidential election. The report on the UK’s involvement came after US intelligence agencies published an unclassified version of their finding that Vladimir Putin ordered a multi-pronged operation to interfere in the election in favour of Donald Trump. The New York Times, citing “two people familiar with the conclusions” of the report, said British intelligence was...

There's a new kind of Android malware that uses Android devices to attack wireless routers and control victims' networks. The malware, which has been dubbed "Switcher Trojan," can leave victims vulnerable to a wide range of cyber attacks, phishing, data theft, and fraud. According to researchers at Kaspersky Lab, Switcher Trojan can redirect all traffic from devices connected to the WiFi network into the hands of cybercriminals. The Android malware infiltrates the wireless router's admin interface with...