Top 10 Stories

The official RSA app exhibitors use to scan delegate badges contains a hardcoded password allowing vendors to access the full features of the device, says Bluebox Security's Andrew Blaich. Vendors of the San Francisco mega-conference expo hall were handed Android Samsung Galaxy S4 phones, locked into kiosk mode and intended for use as scanners of delegates' badges. Lead security chap Blaich tinkered with the app downloaded from the Play Store to power the scanners and...

The financial loss to credit unions affected by the Wendy's data breach uncovered earlier this month appears to be on pace to surpass damages incurred from the high-profile Target and Home Depot breach incidents, according to a report from Krebs on Security. The report quoted B. Dan Berger, CEO at the National Association of Federal Credit Unions, who cited a major spike in debit card fraud in the weeks prior to the breach going public, with cybercriminals “targeting and draining...

Two-thirds of companies that have been the victims of cyber attacks have kept quiet about the breach rather than report it to the police, a poll of British businesses suggests, ahead of plans to force all companies to notify the authorities about cyber attacks. One in 10 British businesses suffered financial loss from cybercrime in the past year, according to a poll of 1,000 Institute of Directors members. Yet of these breached companies, just 28pc said they reported the attack to the...

In an unusual turn of events, members of the Anonymous hacking collective have got involved in an ongoing row going on between a Miami policeman and a civilian who criticised his driving and have decided to reveal personal details about second policeman, who had been harassing the civilian on social media. On the afternoon of 29 January, Daniel Fonticiella, a police officer with the Miami-Dade Police Department, made the mistake of speeding down a freeway...

Sorry, tinfoil types. Crims operate from home base, don't care for cross-border sharing. Trend Micro security bods have 'capped' their epic research efforts to catalogue the world's regional cybercrime undergrounds. The mammoth effort saw researchers crawl through criminal forums in five countries, documenting the nuances of each as they went. The security outfit's forward-looking threat research team detail the findings in the Cybercrime and the Deep Web  "... there is no such thing as 'an underground', threat...

The Internal Revenue Service has issued its second major warning about tax scams in a little over a month– this one involving a phishing email scheme that look a like a message from company executive requesting personal information from employees. The IRS said the scheme has claimed several victims as payroll and human resources offices mistakenly email payroll data including Forms W-2 that contain Social Security numbers and other personally identifiable information to cybercriminals posing as...

US National Security Agency chief Michael Rogers warned Tuesday that hackers will inevitably mount acyber-attack against US infrastructure, similar to the power failure in western Ukraine last year."It's only a matter of the when, not the if, you are going to see a nation state, a group or an actor engage in destructive behavior against critical infrastructure of the United States," Rogers told a cyber-security conference in San Francisco.Rogers also heads the US military's Cyber Command, which is...

In a briefing Monday afternoon, Defense Department leaders announced that the US was participating in a coalition operation with Iraqi and Kurd forces to recapture the city of Mosul from the Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL, and Daesh). The leading edge of that effort, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said, is an ongoing cyber warfare operation against the communications infrastructure of the city. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Ars Technica

Two German hospitals have fallen victim to a ransomware attack that has left them unable to access their systems. It is thought the clean-up operation to remove all traces of the malware could take weeks. According to a report by German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, the attack took place two weeks ago at the Lukas Hospital in the city of Neuss. Another attack took place at the Klinikum Arnsberg hospital which is located in North Rhine-Westphalia. It is not...

US cyber experts have ramped up offensive cyberattacks against the Islamic State (Isis) in an attempt to disrupt the group's ability to use the internet to spread propaganda and fuel recruitment drives, according to US officials. The operations, led from US Cyber Command at Ford Meade, Maryland, have now been stepped up by high-level government players. These agencies have argued the US is falling behind in the ongoing cyberwar, reported theAssociated Press. According to those close to the operation, who spoke on condition...