Top 10 Stories

With LinkedIn providing yet more fodder for attackers' rainbow tables and login bots, Microsoft has decided to start blocking too-common passwords. As a result, Azure Active Directory's 10 million or so users will no longer be able to select a password that's appeared too many times on breach lists, or commonly appears in attackers' login attempts. The new regulation is already live in Microsoft Account Service and in private preview in Azure Active Directory, Redmond...

More than half of organizations attribute a security incident or data breach to a malicious or negligent employee, according to a new survey. Sixty-six percent of the 601 data protection and privacy training professionals surveyed for the Managing Insider Risk through Training & Culture report say their employees are the weakest link in their efforts to create a strong security posture. Awareness of the insider risk, though, is not influencing many companies to put in place practices to improve the...

Hackers stole the public health information — such as names, addresses, birth dates, income data and "social security numbers" of 80 million internet users of India in 2015, a report released by global security software company Trend Micro said on Tuesday. The social security numbers referred to in the report could be the unique identification or Aadhaar numbers of people. The report said data was also stolen from the online government healthcare records. It further said...

Hackers appear to have made off with the equivalent of $2 million in digital currencies from Gatecoin, according to a notice posted on the exchange’s website. The Hong Kong-based firm admitted asecurity breach occurred between May 9 and 12 that allowed unauthorized access to its “hot wallets” holding both Bitcoins and Ethere (a Bitcoin rival). In total, the hackers were able to steal 250 Bitcoins and 185,000 Ethers, representing 15% of Gatecoin’s crypto-asset deposits. Cryptocurrencies are said to...

More CIOs report directly to the CEO (34 percent) than at any time in the past decade, rising 10 percent over last year, according to the 2016 Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey. CIOs with a direct report to the CEO are also the happiest (87 percent report job fulfillment). The findings highlight how CIO priorities continue to shift, revealing the CEO now focuses on IT projects that make money (almost two thirds, 63 percent), compared to...

For the first time ever, cybersecurity researchers are seeing instances where ransomware is being bundled together with bots in order to turn computers into zombies that can send malicious Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. So if victims are refusing to pay to decrypt their files, cybercriminals have found another way to make trouble. According to researchers from enterprise security software firm Invincea, attackers have modified the existing Cerber ransomware so now, not only does...

A British man has been charged in connection to a cyberattack against Mumsnet which knocked the popular parenting website offline. Mumsnet experienced a data breach earlier this year when a hacker broke into the website's servers and exploited administration privileges to redirect the site to a Twitter account which posted messages such as "RIP Mumsnet" and "Our DDoS attacks are keeping you offline," as well as launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against the domain. View full...

While the FBI, in the person of James Comey, continues its campaign to persuade the tech sector that mathematics isn't that big a thing and therefore backdoors are feasible, The European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA) and Europol have tip-toed around the issue, issuing a joint statement that both opposes and supports breaking encryption. Back in February and speaking for itself alone, ENISA was clear about the dangers of undermining encryption. That makes the...

The perils of password re-use have been laid bare with the discovery of a botnet dedicated to finding account credentials on websites and testing the logins it finds on banks. The work is clever since it avoids tripping botnet detection and brute force rate limiters in place at most security-savvy banks, but absent across the wider web. It is likely to work too: wholly unscientific statistics indicate password reuse is a lazy habit of anywhere...

Despite browsing incognito, blocking advertisements, or hiding your tracks, some websites monitor and track your every move online using a new web-tracking technique called Audio Fingerprinting. This new fingerprinting technique can be utilized by technology and marketing companies to deliver targeted advertisements as well as by law enforcement to unmask VPN or Anonymous users, without even decrypting the traffic. Researchers at Princeton University have conducted a massive privacy survey and discovered that Google, through its...