Top 10 Stories

A group of MIT researchers has sketched out a way to address a gap in cybersecurity that exists between human and machine. Human-made rules, which are meant to alert the system of an attack, don’t work unless an attack exactly matches one of those rules. Machine-learning measures typically rely on anomaly detection. Consequently, false alarms aren’t uncommon and the system starts to distrust itself. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Bostinno

On Monday, the VPN service Cloak got an unsettling email: if the owners didn't cough up 10 bitcoin (or $4,400) in the next week, the service would be hit by a denial-of-service attack large enough to bring down the service entirely. The fallout from that downtime would easily cost more than $4,400, so the criminals offered an early payoff as an easy way to avoid all that damage. But today — a full five days...

For the first time, a judge has thrown out evidence obtained via a piece of FBI malware. The move comes from a cased affected by the FBI's seizure of a dark web child pornography site in February 2015, and the subsequent deployment of a network investigative technique (NIT)—the agency's term for a hacking tool—in order to identify the site's visitors. “Based on the foregoing analysis, the Court concludes that the NIT warrant was issued without...

Palo Alto Networks has discovered a unique malware family that can mine bitcoins via the victim’s CPUs and GPUs. The malware, called PWOBot, is completely written in Python and compiled via PyInstaller, generating a Microsoft Windows executable, according to a Palo Alto Networks posting. The malware has affected European organizations, mainly in Poland. A Polish file-sharing service delivers the malware. The malware can download and execute files, log keystrokes, execute Python code and mine bitcoins via...

Aleksandr Panin, the 27-year-old Russian creator behind the malware banking Trojan that allowed cybercriminals to infect millions of computers and drain bank accounts worldwide, has been sentenced to nine and half years in a US federal prison. The US Justice Department said on 20 April that his accomplice, Algerian Hamza Bendelladj, who sold versions of SpyEye online and used it to steal financial information, was sentenced to 15 years. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: International...

Following attacks on the country's Bureau of Meteorology and Department of Parliamentary Services, PM Malcolm Turnbull has announced his AU$230 million Cyber Security Strategy. Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull hopes to help bring the country into the 21st century with his Cyber Security Strategy, announced on Thursday. The PM says that the government will be investing AU$230 million (around $180 million or £125 million) on new measures, including hiring over 100 IT specialists and the...

A new version of the NewPosThings PoS malware is using a clever technique to extract data from infected PoS terminals that almost no security solution monitors for malware activity. The NewPoSThings malware appeared many years ago, and for a long time, it didn't stand out from the crowd of other PoS malware families.  Just like the competition, NewPoSThings infected Windows processes that handled credit card data, scraping content for financial information, and then sending it to...

Six in ten UK employees are putting their businesses at risk of malware infection by using their personal devices to access corporate networks and illegal pirated content, a study has revealed. Although 80% of those accessing the content consider the personal security risks of doing so, only 60% consider the security implications for their employers, according to a study commissioned by threat management firm RiskIQ. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Computer Weekly

Chances are, your Android device doesn’t have malware. Despite concerns that Android is susceptible to some scary security issues, Google argues its mobile operating system has never been better. The company on Tuesday released its Android Security 2015 Annual Report, which shows that as long as users were downloading apps from the company’s Google Play marketplace, they were unlikely to have faced much trouble. In fact, Google’s  GOOGL -1.61%  report shows that “potentially harmful apps,”...

Malware authors have put together a strain of malicious code written entirely in Python, in what may turn out to be an experiment in creating a new type of cross-platform nasty. PWOBot is written entirely in Python, and compiled via PyInstaller to generate a Microsoft Windows executable. The malware has already infected a number of Europe-based organisations, particularly in Poland, according to new research. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: The Register