Top 10 Stories

Five months after the adulterer-friendly dating website Ashley Madison was spectacularly hacked, it seems blackmailers are still trying to dig their claws into people who signed up to the site. According to security blogger Graham Cluley, some former members of the site are now receiving blackmail demands through the post. The letters ask for thousands of dollars and threaten to out former members if the lucre is not forthcoming. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: The Register

Just hours before British astronaut Tim Peake blasts off on his voyage to the International Space Station, the agency running his mission, the European Space Agency (ESA,) has had its website hacked. The personal and login credentials of thousands of subscribers, as well as some officials, have been stolen and posted online by people working for Anonymous. Although the hacktivist group normally have a political reason behind their attacks, a representative told HackRead that it carried out...

Jisc is permanently removing open public access to Janet (the UK government-funded educational network) information, The Register can reveal, after concluding that such access has been exploited to hobble the service. The move, alongside several other large infrastructural changes – which the administrators have asked The Register not to publish for security and insurance reasons – followed a sustained reflective DDoS attack, causing Janet significant problems between the 1 December and 8 December. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Channel Register

The Android/OpFake and the Android/Marry malware families, two banking trojans targeting mobile devices, have (improperly) stored their C&C servers inside Facebook Parse, the company's BaaS (Backend-as-a-Service) offering. BaaS is a cloud-based service that provides mobile app developers with ready-made tools, in the form of APIs, on which they can build the backend (server-side section) of their Android or iOs applications. The campaigns were actually discovered in another study. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Softpedia  

Sony’s Play Station 4 is one of the world’s most popular and most selling gaming consoles with more than 10 million users. In a recent press release, Sony showed its figures. In two years, Sony has shipped more than 30 million consoles which are nearly double the sale figure of their competitor Microsoft’s Xbox One. Almost all these users are waiting for its Jailbreak which was very obvious to happen in the near future. So the wait is over. Good news...

ISIS affiliated Islamic Cyber Army leaks military info to hit back at Anonymous over ‘trolling day’. In response to the “ISIS day of trolling”, the ISIS-affiliated Islamic Cyber Army (ICA) have reportedly released the personal information of some 160 U.S. military personnel. The personal information released included full names, addresses, phone numbers, and emails of numerous high-ranking U.S. and French military officials. It came on a day that Anonymous, a loosely affiliated hacktivist collective, had...

Twitter has issued its first ever warning about a possible hack by state-sponsored actors, as the social media site steps up its scrutiny of possible security breaches. The alert highlights growing concern over hacking activity backed by foreign governments after a year in which high-profile cyber attacks included the breach of 22m personnel profiles at the US Department of Homeland Security. Other companies such as Google and Facebook already have warning systems to alert users who may be targeted by...

According to recent research from Kaspersky Lab and B2B International, nearly half (48 per cent) of the companies surveyed believe they know the identity and motivation of those behind recent DDoS attacks against them, with many naming competitors as key culprits. Whilst criminals seeking to disrupt a company's operations make up over a quarter (28 per cent) of the suspects, a surprising one in eight (12 per cent) companies believe that their competitors are responsible...

Cyber terrorists are probably going to target the UK and more specifically focus on something that will create chaos in the country. After the devastating incidents of Paris in November, many people fear that ISIS and other extremist attackers will not rest. Instead, they will keep on escalating things and spreading terror all over the world. As far as the United Kingdom is concerned, some claim that the Internet broadband network will be an easy target. However, when it comes...

There’s a showdown between the world’s largest corporations, governments, and cybersecurity companies who are going up against a global network of cyber criminals. The British insurance company Lloyd’s estimates that cyber attacks cost businesses as much as $400 billion a year, which includes direct damage plus post-attack disruption to the normal course of business. Some vendor and media forecasts put the cybercrime figure as high as $500 billion and more. The banking and financial services sector has...