Top 10 Stories

Electronic toy and educational material seller Vtech has confirmed that about five million customers were affected in the data theft reported on Friday. They are from all over the world, including the US, UK, France and China. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: BBC

A band of merry world police lead by the United States Customs and Border Protection service shut down 37,479 copyright-infringing websites hawking counterfeit goods in the lead up to the Cyber Monday buying blitz. The takedown involved varying forms of collaboration between 27 countries including the Britain, France, Denmark, and Spain. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: The Register

Top U.S. and Chinese officials will convene this week in Washington for the first round of cyber security talks following the signing of a bilateral anti-hacking accord in September. China's Public Security Minister Guo Shengkun is in Washington through Sunday and will meet U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, Chinese state media reported. U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch is also expected to take part in the discussions. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Reuters

Several WordPress-based websites, including the Reader's Digest site, have been on the receiving end of a another hacking campaign, this one injecting the sites with malware that has uses Angler exploit kit upload various trojans. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: SC Magazine

A love-struck British woman has been fleeced of £1.6 million by two men posing as romantic interests she met through an online dating site. The businesswoman handed over increasingly large sums of cash over 10 months last year to the men totalling US$2.4 million (A$3.3 million). View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: The Register

It’s not unusual for companies to monitor social media in order to ‘protect’ their brands; Microsoft, for example, makes dossiers on journalists who write about the company. Yet Walmart allegedly “is always watching” and went the extra distance to spy on employees by hiring defense contractor Lockheed Martin and allegedly even received help from the FBI. Walmart was most interested in gathering surveillance of employees involved with the group OUR Walmart which planned Black Friday...

India and the Singapore government signed a memorandum of understanding to establish formal co-operation in cybersecurity between the Singapore CERT and the CERT-In to build effective an incident prevention and response mechanism and an information sharing platform to tackle cybersecurity challenges. Security practitioners commend the initiative, saying the co-operation will help combat trans-border cybercrime and effectively address the threat landscape. "The key advantage is in sharing of intelligence to combat current and future trans-border cybercrime and...

The National Security Agency, America's famous intelligence unit, today called an end to its strategy of bulk phone surveillance. The plan is to replace it with a more targeted alternative which will snoop on domestic actors, following approval via court order to demand records from phone companies. The NSA is to be prohibited from collecting bulk data, which it had claimed legitimacy for under the post 9-11 Patriot Act. Edward Snowden, was responsible for making...

Security researchers from Malwarebytes have noticed several compromised WordPress sites have been targeted by a malicious malware campaign. The sites are serving malwares to those who visit sites based on the popular CMS. Attackers using the malware are able to change and customise the malicious content to reflect their needs and intentions. Visitors to the compromised sites will be infected as they run scripts from the site. The attackers are utilising the now notorious Angler...

Got a Raspberry Pi running on Raspbian? You may need to patch it as a result of Raspbian generating weak SSH keys that are predictable to hackers. The free OS, based on Debian and optimised for the Raspberry hardware, is missing a part of its code that would generate better random numbers for the keys, however "/var/lib/systemd/random-seed is missing, because it hasn't been created yet," says the developer. Using user-generated entropy (mouse movements, keyboard input...