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A National Security Agency contractor has been arrested and charged with stealing highly classified information, authorities said on Wednesday, a data breach that could mark a damaging new leak about the U.S. government's surveillance efforts. Harold Thomas Martin, 51, who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, was taken into custody in Maryland in August, said a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity. Booze Allen is the consulting firm that employed Edward Snowden when he revealed...

BuzzFeed was hacked by OurMine on Wednesday in apparent retaliation for a story that claimed to unmask one of the members of the secretive group. On Tuesday, BuzzFeed posted a story claiming to have identified one of the members of the group as a Saudi teen called Ahmad Makki. In response, on Wednesday the hackers managed to breach BuzzFeed with a post, which has since been taken down. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: The Guardian

The email that gave Russian hackers’ access to an Arizona registration base looked like it came from an employee, and any normal person would have clicked on it, Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan said Wednesday. Reagan's comment came during a panel discussion at the Cambridge Cyber Summit in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hosted by CNBC, MIT and The Aspen Institute. The widespread fear among law enforcement and other branches of government is that Russian officials may...

Yahoo last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information at the request of US intelligence officials, according to a report. The company complied with a classified US government directive, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency (NSA) or FBI, two former employees and a third person who knew about the program told Reuters. Some surveillance experts said...

Online retailer Amazon has sparked a flurry of activity after sending out an e-mail to a number of customers telling them their data has been leaked. But the company says that the data breach which includes e-mail addresses and passwords was not due to a computer hack. Instead they claim that they discovered that their own customers details were possibly leaked online by unknown sources. The company who has confirmed the e-mail sent out this...

Pharmaceutical firm Johnson & Johnson has warned that one of its insulin pumps for diabetics is at risk of being hacked, causing an overdose. The firm said the vulnerability concerned its OneTouch Ping pump which is only sold in the US and Canada. However, it told the BBC there had been no reported attacks and the risk was "extremely low". "It would require technical expertise, sophisticated equipment and proximity to the pump," it said. View full story...

Facebook has finished rolling out end-to-end encryption on Messenger, allowing users of the app to protect their conversations from being monitored by hackers, government agencies, or Facebook itself. Trials for the feature started back in July, but this week sources from the company told Wired that the encryption was now available to all of the app's 1 billion users. Messenger's new encryption comes in the form of "secret conversations" — an option that's available by clicking on a user's...

Personal data from more than 1.5 million users of a dating site network that encourages its members to "have a fling" and "have an affair" has been found online. The database, run by C&Z Tech Limited, a New Zealand-based dating company that runs a number of websites and mobile apps, like HaveAFling.mobi, HaveAnAffair.mobi, andHookUpDating.mobi, was found exposed on the open internet and without a password. That data includes usernames and email addresses, passwords (stored in plain text), gender,...

What would Donald Trump do about cybersecurity if elected president? His statements so far have been a little vague. Until now. On Monday, he gave some specifics on how he'd approach protecting the government and private industry from the threat of hackers. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE:

If there is a reason to stay up to date with the latest software updates and patches, it would be for security. Granted not every patch is exciting as sometimes there are no new features, but security is important and generally speaking they should be installed as soon as possible, otherwise you could leave your devices open to attack. In fact Homeland Security has recently issued a warning (via Phandroid) that certain Huawei devices are vulnerable to...