Top 10 Stories

Spotify has claimed hackers did NOT hack into its systems and leak users' details onto the internet. The music firm spoke out after a list featuring the names, email addresses and passwords of hundreds of people who appeared to be Spotify customers were published on a popular filesharing site called Pastebin last week. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: The Daily Mirror

A database reportedly containing roughly 93.4 million Mexican voter registration records was discovered on an Amazon cloud server without any password protection and includes everything from home addresses to ID numbers, a security researcher has disclosed. MacKeeper researcher Chris Vickery, who is well known in security circles for unearthing database flaws by using the Shodan search engine, found the massive trove of records on 14 April and quickly contacted the authorities – including the US...

Roadside sensors and the data gathered from them can be easily hacked, according to field tests by researchers from Kaspersky Lab on the streets of Moscow. Transport infrastructure in modern cities typically includes an array of traffic and road sensors, cameras, and even smart traffic light systems. Data from these devices is gathered in real time and used to manage traffic flows and other functions via real-time road traffic maps, as well as being collated...

Hacker group Ghost Squad, affiliated to the hacktivist collective Anonymous, launched a full scale DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack on KKK (Ku Klux Klan), which effectively shut down the Klan's official website. The Klan's website was targeted in retaliation for the organisation's "blunt racism". At the time of publication, the official KKK Knights website was still down. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: International Business Times

A Taiwan-based security researcher, known as "Orange Tsai," who was awarded a $10,000 bug bounty in February published a report detailing the exploits that led to his discovery of illicit code on a Facebook server.  A consultant at the security firm Devcore, Orange Tsai said he discovered malware that provided access to Facebook employee's passwords, which had been used by a remote attacker to gain access to employee emails and shared files. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: SC...

The $80m (£55.5m) cyber heist that hit the Central Bank of Bangladesh in February has been blamed on almost non-existent IT security. According to investigators, the bank had not even installed a firewall and used second-hand switches bought for $10 to network computers connected to the SWIFT global payments system. The bank's catastrophically inept IT security made it easy for hackers to break into the organisation and arrange the heist, and it has also made...

FBI Director James Comey suggested to a conference in London that his agency paid more than $1.3 million to gray-hat hackers who were able to unlock the iPhone 5C that was used by Syed Farook Rizwan, the dead terrorist who masterminded the attack in San Bernardino, California, in December 2015. According to Reuters, Comey was asked Thursday how much the FBI paid for the technique that eventually allowed investigators to access the locked phone. View...

Everyone is working to a cloud business model now -- even virus writers. Rather than turning a profit just once by selling a security exploit as a one-off, authors of malicious software are now selling malware as a cloud-based service. This means they make money each time someone pays to use or rent one of the products, according to researchers. "The biggest cybercrime operations are essentially computer software and services companies, albeit illicit ones," says...

The frequency and severity of malware attacks has increased "dramatically" since 2011, according to an April 19 State of the Endpoint Report from the Ponemon Institute, sponsored by CounterTack, a company that provides endpoint detection and response technology for enterprises. Of the 694 US IT security practitioners surveyed, 56% reported that malware attacks in recent years have become "stealthier and more difficult to detect." While 43% of respondents told researchers that they had a strategy in...

Fraudsters are using legitimate executive names and email addresses to dupe unsuspecting employees to wire money or sensitive documents to their accounts. The CTO of the Boston Celtics, for one, is fighting back. A clever variant of phishing scams is proliferating among enterprises, forcing CIOs to up their game even as they are still refining their cybersecurity practices to contend with various zero-day attacks. Called whaling, the social engineering grift typically involves a hacker masquerading...