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Following significant feedback from the global PCI community and security experts, the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) announced a change to the date that organizations who process payments must migrate to TLS 1.1 encryption or higher. The previous date of June 2016 has been moved to June 2018. The original deadline date for migration, June 2016, was included in the most recent version of the PCI Data Security Standard, version 3.1 (PCI...

In a strong defence of encryption, Apple's CEO Tim Cook said that there was no trade-off between privacy and national security when it comes to encryption. "I think that's an overly simplistic view. We're America. We should have both," he told Charlie Rose on CBS' 60 Minutes program on Sunday, according to a transcript of the interview posted online. Cook said that people should be able to protect their personal data on their smartphones, such...

HTTP status codes are not normally a thing that aids political dissidents, or really anything to get excited about. But the newly-made code 451, to be used when something is taken down for legal reasons, is a timely exception. Status codes are used when requesting and transmitting data over the internet, for example, pulling up this page. There are five classes, 100s-500s, and tens or hundreds of specific codes within those classes. You normally don’t...

The researcher Chris Vickery has discovered a database leak that exposed 3.3 million accounts belonging to Hello Kitty fans. The database of the official online community for Hello Kitty and other Sanrio characters, the sanriotown.com, has suffered a data breach. The researcher Chris Vickery has discovered online a database exposing 3.3 million accounts belonging to Hello Kitty fans. According to Vickery not only the primary database sanriotown.com was affected, the fan portals of the following websites...

A backdoor password that, according to security company Rapid7, was likely chosen to appear as a debug string, has been found in some versions of Screen OS that were vulnerable to a remote access issue disclosed by Juniper last week. ‎HD Moore, chief research officer at Rapid7, said in a blog post that looking at the differences between the patched and vulnerable versions of ScreenOS, with particular attention to strcmp calls, showed that a default...

What do you do to earn up to $150,000? Somebody just hacks into airlines and sells fake tickets. That's exactly what a 19-year-old teenager did and made approximately 1.1 Million Yuan (£110,000 or $150,000) by hacking into the official website of an airline and using the stolen booking information to defraud hundreds of passengers. The teenager, identified as Zhang from Heilongjiang, north-east China, hacked into a Chinese airline website and illegally downloaded 1.6 Million passengers bookings details. View full...

Russian businesses are forecast to lose almost US$ 1 bn (70 billion rubles £662 million) from cyber-attacks this year and this figure is expected to continue to grow in the near future, Lev Khasis, first deputy chairman of Sberbank, Russia's largest state-owned bank, and a former vice-president of Wal-Mart, told SCMagazineUK.com. These predictions are in line with those of leading Russian  IT security experts. According to data from Kaspersky Lab, this year every second corporate computer in...

Houston-based Landry’s Inc. owns and operates more than 500 properties, such as Landry’s Seafood, Chart House and Rainforest Cafe. Last week, I began hearing from banking industry sources who said fraud patterns on cards they’d issued to customers strongly suggested a breach at the restaurateur. Industry sources told this author that the problem appears to have started in May 2015 and may still be impacting some Landry’s locations. It remains unclear how many of Landry’s 500 properties may be affected. The company says it...

Last New Years Eve, a hacking group “Lizard Squad” spoiled the party for gamers with a DDoS attack on the Play Station network and Xbox Live — Now there’s a new group vows to do the same this X-Mas. This year another group “Phantom Group” (@PhantomSquad) is threatening to do the same, their aim is to knock down Play station network and Xbox live which would mean no access for the gamers to newly launched...

Starting on January 2016, Microsoft's Trusted Root Certificate Program will no longer include twenty currently trusted CAs and will remove their root certificates removed from the Trusted Root CA Store. "This past spring, we began engaging with Certificate Authorities (CA) to solicit feedback and talk about upcoming changes to our Trusted Root Certificate Program. Among other things, the changes included more stringent technical and auditing requirements," Microsoft enterprise and security group program manager Aaron Kornblum...