Top 10 Stories

TalkTalk lost 101,000 customers and suffered costs of £60m as a result of a cyber-attack on the company in October, but said business was returning to normal. The telecoms company said the net loss of customers in the three months to the end of December reflected fewer connections and greater “churn” as customers chose to leave. But revenue increased 1.8% in the period, the third quarter of TalkTalk’s financial year. TalkTalk’s computer systems were hacked in October...

Telekom Austria's mobile internet service was hit by a cyber attack that caused temporary access outages for millions of users in its home market from Friday until late Monday, it said on Tuesday. The company also repelled an attack on its Austrian fixed-line internet infrastructure on Tuesday, a spokesman said. No personal data was stolen, the spokesman said.   Original Source: Reuters View the full story here

Sucuri threat researcher Denis Sinegubko says a "massive" advertising scam campaign is affecting users visiting WordPress sites, injecting backdoors and constantly re-infecting sites. The prolific virus-destroyer (@unmaskparasites) says writers are injecting code into all JavaScript files on a targeted WordPress sites. Sinegubko says first time visitors will cop a cookie that generates fraudulent advertising income for VXers. "This past weekend we registered a spike in WordPress infections where hackers injected encrypted code at the end...

The European Commission, the executive arm for the European Union, has said that it plans to tighten reporting standards for digital currency exchanges as part of a broader effort to restrict terrorist financing channels. The Commission said that it intends to require both exchange and wallet service providers in Europe to identify their customers, a move that comes after growing debate among EU policymakers about whether digital currencies are being used by terrorist groups to transfer...

The decision of the United Nations investigation into the Julian Assange case is set to be revealed and could order the release of Wikileaks founder on February 5. "BREAKING: UN set to announce decision on #Assange's release on Friday,"BREAKING: UN set to announce decision on #Assange's release on Friday," Wikileaks has tweeted. Assange has been living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for over 3 years, after being granted political asylum by the Ecuadorian government of the South American...

When Silicon Valley closes a door for spies, it opens a window. That’s the conclusion of several former government officials, academics and privacy advocates in a study Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society released on Monday. The report argues that despite talk that encryption from the likes of Apple and Google obstructs national security, these companies are creating many new technologies that will make surveillance easier.   Original Source: The Guardian View the full...

Hackers from the AnonSec group who spent several months hacking Nasa have released a huge data dump and revealed they tried to bring down a $222m Global Hawk Drone into the Pacific Ocean. The hack included employee personal details, flight logs and video footage collected from unmanned and manned aircraft. The 250GB data dump contained the names, email addresses and phone numbers of 2,414 Nasa employees, 2,143 flight logs and 631 videos taken from Nasa...

A year old loophole in Apache Web Server, uncovered by an unknown Computer Science Student, could potentially unmask the real identity of .onion-domains and servers hidden behind the Tor-network. Although the loophole was reported on Reddit and to the Tor Project months back, it recently came to the limelight soon after a tweet by Alec Muffet, a well-known security enthusiast and current software engineer at Facebook. What is Tor Hidden (.onion) Service? Dark Web websites...

The US government's firewall, named Einstein, is not as smart as its name would suggest. A report by the General Accounting Office (GAO) into the National Cybersecurity Protection System (NCPS) has concluded that it is only "partially meeting its stated system objectives." Which is a polite way of saying it sucks. Among the extraordinary pieces of information to emerge are the fact that the system – which has cost $5.7bn to develop – does not...

Healthcare records for one in three Americans were breached last year, with records of nearly 112 million people affected by hackers, compared with only about 1.8 million individuals in 2014. That’s the finding of cybersecurity vendor Bitglass, which did a data analysis of the breach disclosure database maintained by the Department of Health and Human Services and required by HIPAA. Overall, 113 million Americans fell victim to all forms of health data breaches in 2015,...