Top 10 Stories

Pokémon Go fans in New York City are reporting that hackers have somehow exploited a vulnerability in the Niantic Labs' mobile game that is enabling them to take over geolocated gyms with eggs, when it should not be possible to do so. On Sunday (15 August), Reddit user tunneyb started a thread in the Pokémon Go section of the social bookmarking site, complaining that lots of New York City Pokémon gyms were not working and requested Niantic...

Students across Britain are being warned to stay safe online after a spate of phishing e-mails from fraudsters aimed at stealing their first loan payment. Half-a-million students are set to start university in the coming weeks, while those in their second and final years will also return, and cunning scammers know thousands of pounds will soon hit most of their accounts (Source: Funding Zest). The fraudulent emails usually claim that failure to respond with personal...

TAMPA, FL — Credit card data was stolen from 20 hotels across America, including one in Tampa, leaving customers vulnerable to identity theft. The 20 targeted hotels are owned and operated by HEI Hotels and Resorts. They include such brands as Marriott, Hyatt, Sheraton and Westin. The hotel in Tampa affected by the breach is the Intercontinental Tampa Bay, 4860 W. Kennedy Blvd. According to HEI Hotels, the breach there occurred between March 21 and...

For the many people that dislike corporate proxies, this probably won't be much of a surprise: a bunch of environments are vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. “FalseCONNECT” is a combination of protocol bug and implementation error – which means it affects end users via operating systems, as well as network devices. The problem is in how two Web protocols interact: HTTP CONNECT (which asks a firewall or proxy to forward a connection, described in RFC 7230), and...

The release on websites this week of what appears to be top-secret computer code that the National Security Agency has used to break into the networks of foreign governments and other espionage targets has caused deep concern inside American intelligence agencies, raising the question of whether America’s own elite operatives have been hacked and their methods revealed. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: NY Times

If docking a phone at unfamiliar charging stations wasn't iffy enough, a “video-jacking” attack by Aries Security researchers highlights yet another attack vector to consider. Similar to “juice jacking,” the attack can be carried out using roughly US $220 (£170) worth of equipment hidden inside what appears to be the charging station to essentially see everything a user sees, taps and does with their device including seeing a user's password entered when they unlock their screen, according to...

The security bug discovered in the Linux kernel's implementation of the TCP protocol also affects a large portion of the Android ecosystem, mobile security vendor Lookout has discovered. According to researchers, CVE-2016-5696, the Linux TCP bug, affects around 80 percent of all Android devices in use today, which is around 1.4 billion devices. The reason for this is because the Android OS is built on a modified version of the Linux kernel. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Softpedia

Eric Wustrow, assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and Benjamin VanderSloot, PHD student at the University of Michigan have created a cryptocurrency that rewards people for taking part in DDoS (“Distributed” Denial of Service) attacks on TLS web servers. The currency only works when the user’s computer targets a TLS-enabled website. TLS stands for Transport Layer Security, a cryptographic protocol for secure Internet communication. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Tech Worm

Whistleblower Edward Snowden is back on Twitter after almost a 10-day hiatus. The former National Security Agency (NSA) agent posted a paraphrased quote of Mark Twain in a tweet, to dismiss rumours and conspiracy theories of his murder, which arose soon after his last post on Twitter, now deleted, went online. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: IBTimes

The local council of the Australian city of Brisbane has been fleeced of A$450,000 (£248,000, US$334,000) from email-whaling scammers who tricked staff into wiring money into their bank accounts. The scammers phoned and emailed the council posing as one of its suppliers. Lord mayor Graham Quirk has commissioned Deloitte to conduct a review into how the scam took place. Quirk told reporters the scammers gained the cash in nine payments made since 13 July. View full story ORIGINAL...