Top 10 Stories

About a million computers have been enslaved into a newly-identified botnet that is plundering Google advertising revenues, a security trio says. The redirector.paco botnet steals advertising revenue by replacing a website's Google AdSense for search results on infected machines with their own. Bitdefender security researchers Cristina Vatamanu, Răzvan Benchea, and Alexandru Maximciuc say the botnet has been active since September 2014 and has infected more than 900,000 machines across India, Malaysia, Greece, and the USA....

The Open Smart Grid Protocol's custom RC4 encryption has been cracked – again. OSGP was called out last year for rolling its own crypto, based on the deprecated RC4, At the time, the OSGP Alliance said it would implement better security, but the RC4 zombie is still shambling around, according to German researchers Linus Feiten and Matthias Sauer of the University of Freiberg. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: The Register

Singapore's central bank has said banks should maintain a high level of security for their critical IT systems following recent cyber attacks using the SWIFT financial messaging system. The Monetary Authority of Singapore "expects financial institutions to implement strong controls in their IT systems as set out in the MAS Technology Risk Management Guidelines," a spokeswoman said in response to media queries. "This includes maintaining a high level of security for their critical IT systems,...

Vietnam's central bank said on Tuesday a failed hacking attempt on Tien Phong Bank (TPBank) using the SWIFT messaging system sought to fraudulently transfer 1.2 million euros ($1.36 million) to a Slovenian bank late last year in one transaction. The thwarted transfer on Dec. 8 was the only hack attempt via SWIFT detected by TPBank and no other Vietnamese lenders, or the central bank itself, have been affected, Le Manh Hung, head of the State...

Incidents of Android lockscreen malware masquerading as porn apps are a growing concern to security analysts who are forecasting an uptick in attacks. Once infected, Android users bitten by this malware appear to be locked out of their device and are forced to undergo a complex extraction of the app to win back control of their phone or tablet. The warning comes from Dell SonicWALL Threats Research Team that said this yet-to-be-named variant of lockscreen...

Hacktivist collective Anonymous has launched cyber-attacks on major financial institutions across the world, including the Bank of England, in order to “start an online revolution.” Hackers claimed to have taken down the Bank of England’s internal email server as part of an operation dubbed ‘OpIcarus.’ Mail.bankofengland.co.uk was down for part of Friday. Hackers affiliated with Anonymous also claimed to have shut down several international banks over the past four days, including the National Reserve Bank...

FireEye has detailed an attack on a recent zero-day vulnerability Adobe patched last week. The flaw (CVE-2916-4117) affects the previous latest version of Adobe Flash and copped a rushed patch after FireEye reported attacks in the wild. Genwei Jiang, a Singaporean senior security engineer, has revealed the details of the previously undisclosed phishing attacks he reported and says it is being actively deployed. Affected users need to run Windows, Flash, and Microsoft Office, and fall...

Apple AAPL +0.24% has removed an app that helped customers hunt down hidden hackers on their iPhones, just a week after it appeared on the marketplace. The ‘System and Security Info’ application, from German firm SektionEins, picked up on various anomalies, including any unsolicited tinkering with certificates supposed to guarantee the legitimacy of applications, and use of files associated with certain jailbreaks. Such jailbreaks can be carried out without the user’s knowledge to remove many of the security protections...

A Vietnamese bank has foiled an attempted cyber heist that involved the use of fraudulent messages, the same technique at the heart of February’s theft from theBangladesh central bank. Hanoi-based Tien Phong Bank said on Sunday that in the fourth quarter of last year it identified suspicious requests through fraudulent messages on the global interbank messaging system Swift to transfer more than $1m. TPBank said it caught the attempt quickly enough to halt movement of...

In the security community is circulating the news about the presence of a backdoor in the gadgets shipped by the popular Chinese ARM maker Allwinner.  Processors manufactured by the company are present is several models of low-cost devices, including Android tablets, set-top boxes, and ARM-based PCs. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Security Affairs