Top 10 Stories

Hackers are claiming to have accounts at major United States government agencies for sale, including NASA, the Navy, and the Department of Veteran Affairs.The unverified cache found by Infoarmor chief intelligence officer Andrew Komarov includes 33,000 records tied to the US Government, plus research and educational organisations and universities. Agencies on the list include the US General Services Administration, National Parks Service, and the Federal Aviation Administration. One government data listing visited by The Register promised alleged...

Officials with GCHQ are said to be mulling a plan that would extend the UK government's network security tools to private-sector ISPs. GCHQ director general for cyber security Ciaran Martin has been in Washington, DC, pitching the plan to arm the ISPs with firewall updates aimed at blocking off known bad actors. The project, said to be part of the new National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) headed up by Martin, is aimed at protecting businesses from attacks by sealing off those...

The World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) has condemned Russian hackers for leaking confidential medical files of star US Olympic athletes. Athletes affected include tennis players Venus and Serena Williams and teenage gymnast Simone Biles. A group calling itself "Fancy Bears" claimed responsibility for the hack of a Wada database. After the leak, Ms Biles said she had long been taking medicine for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: BBC

Hong Kong-based company USB Killer believes that “any public facing USB port should be considered an attack vector.” While ports are often disabled and unusable to the public, they are still vulnerable to an “electrical attack.” To prove the point, the company sells a device, the USB Killer 2.0, which, when plugged into a USB port, it “rapidly charges its capacitors from the USB power lines. When the device is charged, -200VDC is discharged over the data lines...

A website set up to monitor secretive nuclear test facilities across the world — including in Russia, North Korea and Iran — was forced to take its servers offline after suffering a suspiciously-timed distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The cyberattack targeted the 'Project on Crowdsourced Imagery Analysis' which is a satellite mapping campaign ran by the US-based Centre for Non-proliferation Studies (CNS). In a move that raised eyebrows, it came just two days prior to the North Korean...

A controversial bipartisan bill that would prevent tech companies from using strong encryption isn't as dead as was once thought. The bill, which critics argue would have outlawed end-to-end encrypted apps and services because it ensured that companies must turn over readable data to law enforcement, had no support from the Senate, where the bill was raised because it would "undermine the foundation of cybersecurity for millions of Americans". View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: ZDNet

In a world where we increasingly store important information in our laptops, phones and tablets, the security of these devices has never been as important. Now a new computer chip hopes to provide the security such valuable information needs. The chip could deliver the world's most secure encryption keys in a package small enough to use in a smartphone, tablet or laptop, researchers have said, by using quantum mechanics. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Daily...

Voter registration databases and other election systems in two states have been hacked, according to the FBI and local officials, who launched an investigation this month following the discovery of malicious software on a state computer. The incidents led the Federal Bureau of Investigation to send a "flash alert" to election officials earlier this month, asking them to watch for similar cyber-attacks. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: CRC Connection

Instant messaging platform QIP.ru has suffered the loss of approximately 33 million user records, which have emerged as cleartext. Utah-based security firm Heroic was sent the data from a user known as Daykalif who last week leaked 98.1 million cleartext accounts for Rambler. The same hacker also leaked words 43.6 million cleartext records for Last.fm. Heroic communications officer Wyatt Semanek says in a statement it has validated the breached accounts and said they were leaked...

Hackers have breached some 670,000 Pokémon gamer accounts on popular fan site Pokebip. The breach hit the French site on 28 July and includes compromised usernames, email and IP addresses, website activity, and weak MD5 passwords which can be broken in seconds. The site warns that other connected social media accounts including Skype and Facebook could be compromised. It urged users to change all passwords reused on other sites. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: The...