Top 10 Stories

The cyberthreat security firm IID is forecasting the connected devices that will comprise the Internet of Things (IoT) universe are likely to be banded together in a botnet army and used to launch massive attacks by 2017. IID forecast in a new report that the botnet zombie horde will be recruited through malware installed on IoT devices and will be utilized for Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) against large corporations, pay-per-click fraud, along with various...

Canada's national police force said on Wednesday it would create a team of cyber crime investigators to fight hacking attacks on the federal government and other major targets. Canada has seen a wave of intrusions of government and corporate computer networks in recent years, and security experts often complain that the country lags behind its U.S. and European peers in thwarting digital attacks. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Reuters

A leading banking academic and former adviser to the Bank of England has said everyone should have two bank accounts - so they can still access money if a major bank is crippled by a cyber attack. Peter Hahn, senior fellow in banking at London's Cass Business School, and between 2009 and 2014 a senior adviser to the Bank of England, said cyber crime was a new and growing risk which tended to be "not...

Cellular modems from four vendors have been popped by security researchers, who have documented cross-site scripting (XSS), cross-site request forgery (CSRF), remote code execution (RCE) and integrity attacks on the products. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: The Register

The United States and China have reached an agreement on guidelines for requesting assistance on cyber crime or other malicious cyber activities, the U.S. Justice Department said on Wednesday. The agreement was reached in talks in Washington this week among officials including U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, U.S. Department View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Reuters

Japan is at risk of cyber attacks on its essential infrastructure by Islamic State, the country’s minister in charge of public safety said in an interview two weeks after a series of lethal terrorist attacks in Paris. Chairperson of the National Public Safety Commission since October, cabinet minister Taro Kono supervises the National Police Agency, meaning he is closely involved with security arrangements as the country prepares for the Group of Seven meeting in Japan...

What do you do when there are so many cases of cybercrime utilizing a myriad of different types of malware, and you’re the cop that has to dig through them all? Well, you build a massive system for automatically analysing malware from as many countries as possible, of course. In December 2013, Europol, one of Europe's principle law enforcement agencies, launched the Europol Malware Analysis System (EMAS), which is designed to automatically detect and analyse...

VTech, the hacked maker of electronic toys and apps that leaked the data of 4.8 million customers, including hundreds of thousands of children, exposed gigabytes' worth of pictures and chat histories on the same compromised servers, according to an article published on Motherboard, the website that first broke news of the breach. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: ArsTechnica

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reports that China has been fingered as the source for a very substantial attack on a supercomputer operated by Australia's Bureau of Meteorology (BoM). The BoM is an analog of the UK's Met Office and the USA's National Weather Service. Like those agencies, the BoM provides weather data to all sorts of customers, including defence operations. The ABC's suggesting that a breach of the BoM is therefore a threat to...

Criminals are selling 'lifetime' Netflix, HBO, and cable sports streaming accounts for less than US$10 on sites hidden within Tor. Premium sports accounts sell for about $10 while streaming TV can be bought for as low as 50 cents, far less than the $10 monthly subscription. Comic fans can buy a stolen Marvel Unlimited lifetime account - meaning the victim is unlikely to shutter it - for 50 cents compared to the $10 monthly fee....