Top 10 Stories

Wendy's is investigating "unusual activity" related to cards used in some of its restaurants. The fast food chain launched an investigation after being alerted this month by the payments industry to possible fraudulent charges being made "elsewhere after payment cards were legitimately used at some restaurants," said spokesman Bob Bertini. Wendy's is working with cybersecurity experts, payment industry contacts and law enforcement to look into the possible fraud. It's unclear how many cards or restaurant locations...

IT security experts have trashed Home Office plans to recruit volunteers to tackle cybercrime, saying the government is not taking the issue seriously enough. Home Secretary Theresa May plans to bolster the police’s efforts to battle digital crime by empowering police forces to sign up IT workers as volunteers. The proposal, aired again by the Home Office last week but first revealed in a consultation document last year, would allow room for volunteers to take on greater roles “as...

The SANS Institute has moved to quell reports that Israel's energy grid has been hit by malware, revealing instead that the attacks were ransomware infecting the nation's utility regulatory authority. Reports emerged after energy minister Dr Yuval Steinitz said a "severe" attack had hit the authority in what he reportedly called "one of the largest cyber attacks" the agency had experienced. "We are handling the situation and I hope that soon, this very serious event...

UK ISP TalkTalk is considering cutting ties with its Indian call center provider after three employees at the site were arrested for allegedly scamming customers. The budget telco said police in Kolkata have nabbed a trio of Wipro call center workers as part of an investigation into security practices. Wipro runs the customer service call center for TalkTalk. "Acting on information supplied by TalkTalk, the local Police have arrested three individuals who have breached our...

Police have asked Facebook users to be aware of scam artists fooling people into handing over personal information such as bank account details. Hackers have been posting misleading adverts on timelines, fooling the victim's friends into thinking the post, which normally promises money, is genuine. Northumbria police have issued a warning urging for caution. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Huffington Post

Facc AG, a manufacturer of aeroplane parts, has admitted in its third quarter financial report that cyber-criminals targeted the firm's accounting department and managed to defraud it of €50 million (£38 million). “FACC´s IT infrastructure, data security, IP rights as well as the operational business of the group are not affected by the criminal activities,” the report said. The firm did not give any further details about the attack. “The management board has taken immediate structural measures...

The world's largest distributed denial of service attack has been clocked at 500Gbps, according to Arbor Networks. The attack was reported by a third party and is yet to be analysed, other than in terms of its size. British teen Seth Nolan-Mcdonagh likely held the title for the previous largest DDoS, which came in at 300Gbps. He was arrested and ducked jail after he knocked SpamHaus off the internet. The annual Arbor survey (PDF) gathered 354 responses from service...

Independent security researcher Michael Stepankin has reported a since-patched remote code execution hole in Paypal that could have allowed attackers to hijack production systems. The critical vulnerability affecting manager.paypal.com revealed overnight was reported 13 December and patched soon after disclosure. It allowed Stepankin to execute arbitrary shell commands on PayPal web servers through Java object deserialisation opening access to production databases. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: The Register  

Centene Corporation announced that it experienced a potential healthcare data breach that may affect approximately 950,000 individuals. Centene reported that there is an ongoing search for six missing hard drives, which were unaccounted for in its inventory of IT assets. The company statement did not specify whether the hard drives were encrypted, but said that individuals who may have had their information exposed had received laboratory services from 2009-2015. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Health IT Security

The Israel’s Minister of Infrastructure, Energy and Water, Yuval Steinitz, told CyberTech 2016 attendees in Tel Aviv that the Israeli Public Utility Authority suffered a severe cyber attack. The threat actors hit the Public Utility Authority with a malware caused problems with the internal systems, some of them still not working properly. The country’s energy minister said Tuesday that officials are still working to neutralize it, meanwhile, The Jerusalem Post describes the incident as one of the biggest cyber attack...