Top 10 Stories

Adobe has announced that it will be issuing an emergency security update for its widely-used Flash Player, after discovering hackers were actively exploiting a security hole to hijack control of computer systems. The one piece of good news is that if you have been doing a reasonably good job of keeping your systems updated then you may already be benefiting from a mitigation introduced in Flash Player 21.0.0.182 that, according to Adobe, "currently prevents exploitation of this...

Data loss prevention (DLP) is to be the top security initiative by UK firms in 2016, according to the latest annual TechTarget/Computer Weekly IT Spending Priorities survey. This shows a shift away from identity and access management (IAM), which was the top area of investment for firms in the UK and Europe in 2015, to focus more directly on data protection. The top prioritisation of data loss prevention by 38% of UK firms is also...

Slack has a lot of functions, but end-to-end encryption isn’t one of them, which makes the platform a no-go for some users. Launching to the public today, ClearChat comes along to save the day, serving the needs of the slightly more security-conscious teams, with chat, file transfer and more. ClearChat describes its service as “a combination of Slack and Dropbox,” except with some heavy-duty encryption and security-first design decisions thrown in. The company’s services have been designed with...

Chinese hackers were possibly behind one of the world's biggest cyber heists, the theft of US$81mil (RM316.8mil) from the Bangladesh central bank, a senator in the Philippines said, while a Manila bank manager involved in the case said she was a pawn of senior bankers and unnamed tycoons. Unidentified hackers stole the money from the Bangladesh Bank's account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in early February and funneled it through a Manila...

During an interview at Tuesday's International Association of Privacy Professionals conference in Washington, FBI lawyer James A. Baker said data extracted from an iPhone linked to San Bernardino terror suspect Syed Rizwan Farook is being applied to the agency's ongoing investigation, reports The New York Times. He was less forthcoming when asked if the phone contained useful information. "We're still working on that, I guess is the answer," Baker said, adding, "It was worth the...

THE NATION OF Turkey has been reeling from terrorist bombings in its biggest cities, a teeming refugee crisis, and a president who wants to rewrite its constitution to give himself more power. Now, in the midst of those calamities, it’s also been hit with what appears to be an enormous data breach, one that affects the majority of the country’s citizens. In a 1.4GB compressed folder, an unknown hacker posted the details of over 50...

Cisco is releasing security updates to fix a critical vulnerability (CVE-2016-1345) that affects one of its newest products, the FirePower firewall. The flaw has been discovered by security researchers at Check Point Security. According to the security advisory published by Cisco, an attacker can remotely exploit the flaw to allow malware bypass detection measured implemented by the FirePower firewall. “A vulnerability in the malicious file detection and blocking features of Cisco Firepower System Software could allow...

A serious server hack at Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca has led to the biggest information breach in recent years, with the release of of 2.6TB of data relating to some of the most powerful people in the world. The cache of 11.5 million leaked files - primarily emails, but also PDFs, text files and others - is being referred to as "the Panama Papers" and was obtained from an anonymous source by German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. It...

The feds warned that “a group of malicious cyber actors,” whom security experts believe to be the government-sponsored hacking group known as APT6, “have compromised and stolen sensitive information from various government and commercial networks” since at least 2011, according to an FBI alert obtained by Motherboard. The alert, which is also available online, shows that foreign government hackers are still successfully hacking and stealing data from US government’s servers, their activities going unnoticed for...

US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's chain of luxury hotels is facing yet another possible breach. Hackers reportedly breached the Trump Hotel Collection, which includes more than a dozen properties around the world, and stole customer credit card information. According to cybersecurity specialist Brian Krebs, he noticed the hack when the financial and banking sector alerted him about certain patterns of fraudulent credit card charges emerging from the Trump Hotel Collection, which suggested that hackers...