Top 10 Stories

Technicians supporting the Post Office's Horizon IT system have revealed a known software flaw that could lead tosubpostmasters submitting inaccurate accounts. Post Office IT support sent an email to a member of the postmasters' branch of the Communications Workers Union (CWU) revealing the flaw. The email said Post Office IT support planned to fix the glitch “with a code change” in early 2016. Subpostmasters have not been warned about this flaw in the system. Campaigners blame the Horizon computer...

Open data is being made more accessible in the European Union with the launch of a web portal that allows people and companies to find public data sets from across the continent. The European Data Portal was deployed for the European Commission by consulting firm Capgemini and the Open Data Institute, along with other corporate and academic institutions. It harvests meta data from over 240,000 open data sets in Europe. Currently in a beta version, the portal...

Evaluating the mobile payment preferences of 1,217 consumers from the U.S., a new Research Now survey revealed that 17 percent of respondents who did not make holiday purchases with their mobile phone last year, plan to use a payment service such as Apple Pay, Android Pay, Samsung Pay or a proprietary service from their bank or card issuer to make the leap to mobile payments this holiday season. People who will not be using their mobile...

VMware has warned users of its vCenter, vCloud Director and Horizon products that they need to patch a flaw in Flex BlazeDS. The flaw, CVE-2015-3269, means Apache Flex BlazeDS “allows remote attackers to read arbitrary files via an AMF message containing an XML external entity declaration in conjunction with an entity reference, related to an XML External Entity (XXE) issue.” The Apache software creates problems when “used in flex-messaging-core.jar in Adobe LiveCycle Data Services”. The CVE...

Hacktivist collective Anonymous is encouraging people to join its cyber war against Isil, with the publication of a series of guides explaining how they can get involved in its Operation Paris (OpParis) campaign. The guides include a "NoobGuide" for anyone wanting to learn how to hack, a "Reporter" guide that explains how to set up a Twitter bot for uncovering Isil accounts, and a "Searcher" guide for finding IS websites. They have been posted to...

Anonymous have released a "how to" guide for wannabe hackers, in the hopes of gaining more recruits in their cyberwar against Islamic State. The group of hackers posted three guides including details on how to identify and take down ISIS related websites and social media accounts, as part of OpParis -- their online campaign against the militants. According to the International Business Times, their instructions included a "NoobGuide" for those who want to learn how to hack,...

Two security researchers have discovered a number of bugs, bad practices, and design issues in the popular LastPass password manager. Martin Vigo and Alberto Garcia Illera, both security engineers at Salesforce.com, recently presented their analysis of LastPass at Black Hat Europe 2015. In a blog post describing their findings, Vigo and Garcia say that after conducting some preliminary research, the duo decided to see if they could attack LastPass's password vault directly and obtain access to LastPass credentials...

During a routine screening of police body cams, researchers at security firm iPower were shocked to discover that a number of cameras built by Martel Electronics were infected with malware right out of the box. When iPower connected the cameras to the computers used to check hardware for hidden viruses and spyware, the PCs immediately detected the presence of Win32/Conficker.B!inf, a telltale sign of the Conficker Worm. When deployed successfully, the Conficker Worm is able to...

Dr David Macnish, former GCHQ employee has advised that the government should extend the data protection act to protect citizens who are increasingly involved in large data mining projects undertaken by corporations and governments, often unknowingly. If an ethics board was enforced, it would affect many UK companies embarking on big data projects to better understand its customers,as well as tech giants like Google, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter whose business model runs on collecting information about its users. View full story ORIGINAL...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been awarded control of its namesake domain, which was being used to install malware on people's computers. The EFF used the official uniform dispute resolution process (UDRP) run by UN agency WIPO to take control of ElectronicFrontierFoundation.org – the EFF's real website is at eff.org. The registrant of the bogus .org is named as Shawanda Kirlin of Bali, Indonesia. The EFF assumes that is a fake name. In any...