Top 10 Stories

British researcher Jack Whitton has reported a Microsoft account hijacking authentication bug that would have been another arrow in an attacker's phishing quiver, save for the fact that Microsoft fixed it. Whitton quietly reported the flaw to Microsoft which pounced and took only two days to process and patch the flaw. The flaw meant attackers would have been able to set up phishing sites for Microsoft assets like Outlook and then capture tokens which could...

The Consular Consolidated Database (CCD), which contains over 290 million passport-related records, 184 million visa records, and 25 million records on US citizens living abroad, has been found to be vulnerable to cyber attack and possibly data tampering. The discovery was the result of an internal review of the US State Department’s cyber defenses performed several months ago and, according to a Department’s official, “visa-related gaps” have already been fixed. Original Source: Help Net Security...

A high-profile US hacker has turned an attack on his website into an assault against the Israeli intelligence service. 'The Jester' – or th3j35t3r – claims that he diverted an attempt to overload his website to assault Mossad's online presence. Haaretz reported that Jester's website – jesterscourt.cc – was the victim of a denial of service (DoS) attack on the night of 1 April. In a tweet, Jester announced that he had diverted the hacker's attack by...

The US government's technology agency has updated its secure email guide for the first time in a decade and put it out for a month of public comment. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) guide  is 81 pages long and provides a surprisingly useful rundown on what to do to get your email secure. Its top-line point: email can be made sufficiently secure for important and confidential communications, but it will require adding multiple...

One of the world’s largest data leaks, called the Panama Papers, is shedding light on the world of offshore financing, used frequently by many of the richest and most powerful around the globe. An anonymous source reportedly tipped off Suddeutsche Zeitung, an investigative newspaper in Germany, which then shared the information with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.   Original Source: Forbes View the full story here

A Columbian computer expert has claimed he has single-handedly changed the results of major elections across Latin America for a decade, as part of an explosive new interview which throws open the region's "dark side of politics". Andrés Sepúlveda told Bloomberg that he accepted huge amounts of money to hack and disrupt elections in favour of right-wing candidates in Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua and Panama for almost eight years. Original Source:...

IBM security guy Nils Rodday says thieves can hijack expensive professional drones used widely across the law enforcement, emergency, and private sectors thanks to absent encryption in on-board chips. Rodday says the €25,000 (US$28,463, £19,816, AU$37,048) quadcopters can be hijacked with less than $40 of hardware, and some basic knowledge of radio communications. With that in hand attackers can commandeer radio links to the drones from up to two kilometres away, and block operators from...

Cybercriminals on opposite sides of the world in Russia and Brazil have overcome time differences and language barriers to work together. The collaboration is driving a rapid evolution of malicious tools, security researchers at Kaspersky Lab warn. The Brazilian and Russian cybercrime undergrounds have both created numerous, active and diverse forums. Historically, both geographical markets have developed independently from each other, creating distinct cyber-attack techniques tailored to local conditions (eg, the "Boleto" malware in Brazil,...

In an opinion piece for The Telegraph newspaper, William Hague, the Conservative former Foreign Secretary in the UK, says the latest Brussels terrorist attacks shows the need to crack terrorist communications. Pointing out the terrorists communication of choice, “mobile phones” which “had evidently not been used before and showed no record of texts, chat or emails,” had led him to claim that their chosen method of communication had been “sufficiently private or encrypted that the...

Cyber criminals have been targeting major law firms in what may have been an attempt to gather data for insider trading deals, according to reports. The Wall Street Journal said that a number of US companies had had their computer systems compromised. The FBI would not confirm whether or not an insider trading investigation was under way. Earlier in the year, security company Flashpoint had warned some firms that hackers were targeting legal offices. View...