Top 10 Stories

A quasi-governmental U.S. electric industry group last week advised members to review network defenses following reports that 80,000 customers of a Western Ukraine utility lost power for six hours following a cyber attack. The Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center, or E-ISAC, urged members to "do a better job" at implementing multiple layers of defense against potential cyber attacks, saying the incident at Ukraine's Prykarpattyaoblenergo electricity provider appeared to be the result of a "coordinated...

A malware attack targeted specifically at businesses and consumers who might use WhatsApp has been found unleashed in the wild. According to the Comodo Antispam Labs (CASL) team, as part of a random phishing campaign, cyber-criminals are sending fake emails claiming to be delivering legitimate WhatsApp content; instead, the messages spread malware when the target clicks on the “message.” The attachment contains a compressed (.zip) file, which houses a malware executable. The malware is a...

European police have arrested eight cyber criminals who raided automatic teller machines (ATMs) across the continent using Tyupkin malware.The malware enabled the gang of Romanian and Moldovan nationals to manipulate ATMs and empty cash cassettes. According to Europol, this is one of the first law enforcement operations against this form of cyber crime, known as ATM “jackpotting”. An investigation by security firm Kaspersky Lab in 2014 found that the Tyupkin ATM malware was found mainly in Eastern Europe,...

IBM's X-Force security team is warning of new malware preying on Japanese bank customers. The software nasty is stealthy enough to evade the vast majority of antivirus packages, we're told. Japanese banks have been something of a low priority for crooks, given the difficulties of performing social engineering tricks using a language that's alien to the vast majority of cyber-crims. Having said that, the Land of the Rising Sun is coming under increasing attack, and this...

Google has promptly removed 13 compromised apps from the Google Play Store after mobile cybersecurity firm Lookout found the developers behind the Brain Test strain of malware had returned.According to Lookout, apps riddled with variants of the Brain Test malware attempt to gain root privilege, and persist factory resets and other efforts to remove it, which Lookout said is especially the case on rooted devices. The first two Brain Test malware instances were found by...

Mozilla has warned Firefox users they may be cut off from more of the web than expected – now that the browser rejects new HTTPS certificates that use the weak SHA-1 algorithm. If you use Firefox with some antivirus products, or on a network fitted with a box that inspects traffic for malicious stuff, and visit a site that uses an old crummy SHA-1-signed SSL cert, the browser will refuse to access that website. Firefox...

The protection of confidentiality and the integrity of communications and stored data is more important than the investigation of crime and terrorism, according to an official Dutch government statement on encryption. Published by the Ministry of Security and Justice and signed by the security and business ministers, the five-page paper runs through the arguments for enhanced encryption and the impact that this has on police and intelligence services investigating serious and organised crime and acts...

Some 40% of UK adults have received phishing messages claiming to come from HMRC, yet almost a half are unconcerned about the risk of losing personal information ahead of the January tax deadline, according to new research from Miracl. The multi-factor authentication firm polled 1,000 UK consumers to better understand attitudes to online security. It found that a worryingly high 20% had been a victim of data theft or identity fraud, or knew a close...

A vulnerability that allows an attacker to act as a ‘shell user' on the first version of SilentCircle's Blackphone has been discovered by SentinelOne, purveyors of endpoint security. The Blackphone gained notoriety in the security industry for being the only phone that provides users control over app permissions, such as the bundled Silent Phone and Silent Text services that anonymise and encrypt communications so no one can eavesdrop on voice, video and text calls. In speaking with...

Cybercriminals are taking advantage of an organization that issues free digital certificates, sparking a disagreement over how to deal with such abuse. On Wednesday, Trend Micro wrote that it discovered a cyberattack on Dec. 21 that was designed to install banking malware on computers. The cybercriminals had compromised a legitimate website and set up a subdomain that led to a server under their control, wrote Joseph Chen, a fraud researcher with Trend. If a user went to...