Top 10 Stories

Microsoft is closing out the year with a fix for 71 security vulnerabilities in Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, and Edge. Among the patches are two vulnerabilities that are already being exploited in the wild for elevation of privilege and remote code execution. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: The Register

"The password is weak and crap," said Nick Savvides, Symantec ANZ business manager of information protection. Speaking recently to media in Singapore, Savvides went on to say that having passwords -- no matter how complicated they are -- is not the ideal way for companies to protect themselves against online threats, as cybercriminals are getting better at what they do. He added in particular with the rise of the Internet of Things, cloud, and mobility,...

Redmond is scrambling to propagate a new certificate for the *.xboxlive.com domain, having “inadvertently disclosed” the certificate's contents. In its advisory, Microsoft says the accidental disclosure of the cert's private keys could expose customers to man-in-the-middle attacks, although the cert “cannot be used to issue other certificates, impersonate other domains, or sign code”. Redmond doesn't say how many people may have seen the certificate. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: The Register

According to Kaspersky Lab, the number of new malware files detected by its products in 2015 decreased to 310,000 a day, falling 15,000 from the 2014 number of 325,000. However, despite the reduction in malware creation, in 2015 the number of users that were targets of attacks by cybercriminals increased by five percent. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Help Net Security

The scaling out to many thousands of devices per organization represents a wealth of new opportunities, according to a report by Quocirca. However, the same security rigor and vigilance applied to traditional IT devices needs to be extended to all connected things. The IoT is an evolutionary concept with as much power to improve existing or brown-field business processes as it does to create new green-field ones. Many equate the IoT purely to machine-to-machine (M2M)...

The Internet of Things and the development of so-called ‘smart cities are fueling huge worldwide growth in the number of connected ‘things’, with latest estimates of 1.6 billion of these connections being used by smart cities next year - 2016 – alone. According to analyst firm Gartner, smart commercial buildings – with 518 million ‘connected things’ in use in 2016 - will be the highest user of Internet of  Things (IoT) until 2017, after which...

After hacking and taking down social media accounts of ISIS members, the online Hacktivist group Anonymous is back again with its new plan to harass the Islamic State (IS) militant group that was behind the horrific terror attack in Paris. Anonymous declared total war against ISIS after the last month's Paris attacks and supposedly took down thousands of Twitter and social media accounts used by the ISIS terrorists, disrupted the terror group's primary communications platform...

Drunk Brits lose 138,000 devices a year in bars but get most of them back, according to a pub poll by security firm Eset. The mobile security vendor pinged 600 establishments across the country and extrapolated the results to come up with the 138,000 approximation. Mobile devices were often dropped in watering holes across the nation, with most lacking security controls to prevent finders snooping through photos and messages. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: The...

Demand for cyber security experts has quadrupled to a record high over the last year following data breaches at Talk Talk, Sony and Ashley Madison. This surge in finance and business services jobs will lead to a strong start to the new year for the jobs market, with employers more optimistic than at any time during 2015. The Manpower Employment Outlook Survey asks more than 2,000 British employers whether they intend to increase or cut down...

EU lawmakers and member states struck a deal on the bloc's first cyber-security law on Monday that will require Internet firms such as Google and Amazon to report serious breaches or face sanctions. The deal, following five hours of negotiations between the European Parliament and EU governments, was reached in response to increasing worries about cyber attacks resulting in security and privacy breaches. The European Commission's digital chief, Andrus Ansip, said the new law would build...