Top 10 Stories

A hacker is apologizing for knocking thousands of British TalkTalk and Post Office internet subscribers offline in a recent botnet powered DDoS attack. “Sorry for UK Post Office,” a hacker who goes by the name BestBuy told Motherboard in an online chat before adding that the internet providers “should give their customers better hardware :\.” BestBuy said that they were just trying to enlist more devices on to their modified Mirai-powered botnet, which they dubbed Annie, but too many requests...

Foreign governments have been caught plotting a massive cyber attack on Russia's financial system, the Kremlin's main intelligence agency has claimed. The Federal Security Service, the main successor agency to the KGB, said on Friday that it had received information about "plans by foreign secret services to carry out large-scale cyber attacks from December 5." It said the plot would use data centers in the Netherlands that belong to a Ukrainian hosting company called Blazing Fast. It did...

The Royal Air Force Club appears to have been the victim of a hack, following members being sent fake invoices for staying at the club's London HQ. A source contacted The Register with a copy of the fake invoice, which was for £200 and spoofed to appear as if it had come from the club itself. The Register emailed the RAF Club to ask whether the membership list had been accessed by hackers. A club spokesman said: "The...

The attack affected 100,000 Post Office customers on Sunday and up to 360,000 TalkTalk customers across the UK today. It used a piece of malware known as the Mirai worm, which is spread via compromised computers and works by taking control of devices running the Linux operating system and using them to knock services offline. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: The Daily Mail

Thousands of computers in Saudi Arabia's civil aviation agency and other Gulf State organisations have been wiped by the Shamoon malware after it resurfaced some four years after wiping thousands of Saudi Aramco workstations. Security firms FireEye, CrowdStrike, McAfee, PaloAlto, and Symantec reported on the advanced sabotage malware which United States intelligence officials say is Iran's handiwork. Shamoon's 2012 attack crushed Saudi Aramco, wiping data on three-quarters of its enterprise computers, replacing emails and documents...

A four year investigation by German police has culminated in a coordinated takedown of around 830,000 domains used to control hundreds of thousands of ransomware infections. An international law-enforcement operation dubbed Avalanche has decapitated a massive malware network behind notorious file-encrypting ransomware such as Teslacrypt and Cerber. The malware network has been in operation since 2009, underpinned by around 600 servers and 830,000 domains that were used to distribute ransomware and manage infected computers. On...

The radical transparency website WikiLeaks suffered a suspicious outage on December 1 for 4 hours, and many social media users quickly speculated that this situation could have been the result of another distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) cyber strike, which has been very known this year after it attacked major websites as Twitter, Spotify and GitHub. This situation -which comes after the organization posted the release of 60,000 emails from the U.S. government contractor HBGary- started at 4:00am...

In what is being called the largest Google account breach to date, more than a million Android users stand at risk as a malware called Gooligan is giving access to hackers to root their devices remotely. Researchers from Check Point say they have stumbled upon this family of Android-based malwarewhich has been found in at least 86 apps available in third-party marketplaces. It can remotely root the device to gain privileged system access to Android devices...

State-sponsored hackers aligned with Russia may attempt to influence the outcome of next year's general election in Germany by spreading misinformation and hacking government emails, the head of the country's Federal Intelligence Service has claimed. Bruno Kahl, president of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), warned that hackers will try and undermine the democratic process by using cyberattacks to "elicit political uncertainty." He told Süddeutsche Zeitung that pressure on public discourse and democracy is "unacceptable." View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE:...

A global research team has hacked 10 different types of implantable medical devices and pacemakers finding exploits that could allow wireless remote attackers to kill victims. Eduard Marin and Dave Singelée, researchers with KU Leuven University, Belgium, began examining the pacemakers under black box testing conditions in which they had no prior knowledge or special access to the devices, and used commercial off-the-shelf equipment to break the proprietary communications protocols. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE:...