Top 10 Stories

Rapid7 researcher Phil Bosco has discovered a crucial flaw in the Comcast XFINITY Home Security system, which can be easily exploited by burglars to enter homes without triggering the alarm, and for which there is currently no mitigation and no patch. The Comcast XFINITY Home Security system, which consists of a battery-powered base station and one or more battery-powered sensors, alerts owners if a door or window is opened, and allows them to monitor visually...

Over half of the UK's high-street banks and building societies use outdated SSL security that means their online customers can be attacked by low-skilled cyber-criminals, and “they don't seem to care”, according to security firm Xiphos Research. Birmingham-based Xiphos checked 22 UK-owned retail banks and found 50 percent still use vulnerable Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates despite problems known about for months and even years. A further 79 percent of 25 foreign-owned retail banks operating...

Plans by the UK's Conservative government to legitimize the mass surveillance of Brits won't work, and will cause lives to be lost to terrorism. That's the view of a former senior US National Security Agency (NSA) staffer, who will sound off on blanket snooping at a parliamentary hearing this afternoon (Wednesday). William Binney, the former technical director of the NSA's Analytic Services Office, will give evidence before the Investigatory Powers Bill committee, which is scrutinizing proposals...

HSBC customers are still encountering problems with the bank's online and mobile banking services, which the lender said related to a technical glitch and not a cyber attack. The fault, which first emerged on Monday morning, has prevented some customers from transferring money or doing other online transactions. In a statement HSBC's UK Chief Operating Officer John Hackett said: "We profoundly apologise for any inconvenience this has caused. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Evening Standard

Many web publications have decided to ask readers kindly to disable ad blockers if you visit their site with adblock on. For a publisher that relies on advertising (instead of donations like we do) it makes sense to have users turn the adblock off, their income from advertisers is dwindling and they wish to stop it. For a reader, however, there may be other reasons for using adblock than just to avoid ads. Any ad network...

Marie Moe, a former member of Norway's Computer Emergency Response Team, gave a talk at the 32nd Chaos Communication Congress (32C3) in Hamburg, Germany, revealing details about unsafe practices used for modern-day pacemaker devices. A pacemaker is a medical device implanted under a person's skin, with wiring going down to his heart, helping regulate abnormal heart rhythms. Invented in the 1920s, these devices have evolved across time, shrinking in size, and in recent years gaining...

Fifty per cent of UK high street financial institutions utilise weak SSL certificates on their secure authentication portals, according to a new study by Xiphos Research. An assessment of 84 UK- and foreign-owned banking institutions in November by the international information security firm, and published on Monday, found that more than half were running SSL certificates that may expose their customers data to unwarranted risk. Original Source: The Register View the full story here

Microsoft has joined a growing list of technology firms that will inform users if they have been targeted by nation-state cyber snoops. The move was confirmed by Scott Charney, corporate vice president of trustworthy computing at Microsoft, who explained that the company will now warn users if an account has been "compromised" by a government or nation-state attacker. "We're taking this additional step of specifically letting you know if we have evidence that the attacker...

Just in time for tax season in the U.S., scammers are once again using fake emails from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to launch attacks. The latest phishing campaign, discovered by researchers at Heimdal Security, claims to inform recipients of a refund notification from the IRS. According to a blog post by the research team at Heimdal Security, the emails deliver a very different kind of payload: an attachment that activates Windows PowerShell to downloadKovter...

A central European security software firm said that a cyberattack last month in Ukraine was broader than initially reported last week when the nation's secret police blamed a power outage on Russia. Western Ukraine power company Prykarpattyaoblenergo reported an outage on Dec 23, saying the area affected included regional capital Ivano-Frankivsk. Ukraine's SBU state security service responded by blaming Russia and the energy ministry in Kiev set up a commission to investigate the matter. Original...