Top 10 Stories

The Department of Defense announced today that registration for its Hack the Pentagon bug bounty trial program is open, and that the program will be run on the HackerOne platform. The trial of the government’s first bug bounty program will run April 18 to May 12. The DoD said only certain public-facing websites will be in scope, and that those, along with payment details, will be revealed to registrants as the start date nears. The...

The FBI has agreed to help prosecutors in a murder case hack into a suspect's iPhone just days after the agency ended a legal standoff with Apple by announcing it had cracked the encryption on a known terrorist's phone. The FBI has declined to tell the tech giant how it managed to access the iPhone 5c of Syed Farook, one of the San Bernardino attackers, and appears prepared to attempt to duplicate the process in...

Russia and the US plan to resume the cybersecurity cooperation that was almost suspended after the beginning of the Ukrainian crisis and western sanctions against Russia. As part of these plans, the partners plan to accelerate the execution of a package of agreements in the field of cyber-defence, signed by the Russian and US Premiers as far back as in 2013.  One of the most important of those agreements involves the establishment of a hotline...

A fifth of Irish businesses have fallen victim to ransomware attacks but the majority of firms said they would never pay a ransom, new research has found. The survey, which was carried out by IT firm Data Solutions in association with TechPro magazine, found 93 per cent of businesses would refuse to hand over money to attackers if they found themselves in such a situation. Ransomware attacks typically see business data held or encrypted by...

A former FBI investigator who helped expose Soviet double agent Robert Hanssen1 warns that enterprises should give up worrying about hackers, “who are now the good guys”, and be more worried about spies. Veteran spy hunter turned infosec exec Eric O'Neill said that espionage has evolved and become increasingly digital as hackers have become key in exposing security bugs through bug bounties and the like. The evolution of the threat landscape has happened without corporate...

The United States Marine Corps has launched a hacking support unit. The Marine Corps Cyberspace Warfare Group (MCCYWG) is already functioning with a small contingency of staff and will ramp up with full operational capacity expected next year. It will support the US Marine Corps Forces Cyberspace (MARFORCYBER) established 2010 and follows the launch of other hacking units and cyber doctrine implemented last year. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: The Register

Consider this a reminder that end-of-life software doesn't get patches: researchers have turned up more than 1,400 vulnerabilities in a widespread automatic drug dispensing system from CareFusion, because old units are still running Windows XP. The computer-controlled dispensing cabinets are installed in hospitals and pharmacies around the world. In large deployments, they can be connected as a network of dispensary workstations that report usage in real time – incidentally providing a vector for remote attacks....

Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer, one of the two men who were prosecuted and convicted for harvesting e-mails and authentication IDs of 114,000 early-adopters of Apple’s iPad from AT&T’s servers, is back to his old tricks: using publicly accessible assets for furthering his own goals. As described in an extensive blog post, he discovered a great number of printers accessible (without authentication) through port 9100 open to the Internet, and fed them a simple Bash script that would instruct them to repeatedly...

Malwarebytes researcher Jerome Segura says malvertisers have served the world's most dangerous exploit kit - Angler - through compromised advertisements run on LiveJournal.com and news serviceLikes.com. The attacks are the latest in a string of brazen and successful malvertising campaigns that are smashing the web's most popular websites. It represents a colossal win for the malvertising criminals: Livejournal pulls 140 million clicks a month while Likes attracts some 110 million visitors. Visitors to the sites or any...

The FBI's announcement that it mysteriously hacked into an iPhone is a public setback for Apple Inc., as consumers suddenly discover they can't keep their most personal information safe. Meanwhile, Apple remains in the dark about how to restore the security of its flagship product. A few clues have emerged. A senior law enforcement official told The Associated Press that the FBI managed to defeat an Apple security feature that threatened to delete the phone's...