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Insta-Agent, an app that purported to show users who viewed their Instagram profiles, secretly sent passwords to developers and posted images without permission. Having been downloaded over half a million times, the app was hugely popular with Instagram users. The app was downloaded between 100,000 and 500,000 times in the UK on Android, making it top of the free download charts in both the UK and Canada. Users who logged in to the app had...

The Times reported that the UK Parliament’s secure network has been breached, with several computers on it having been compromised by hackers. Chi Onwurah, Labour MP for Newcastle Upon Tyne Central and her employees appear to be the main target of the attack. Ms. Onwurah is the shadow minister for culture and the digital economy, Through delivering and spreading crypto-ransomware, hackers were apparently able to encrypt sensitive files that were stored in a shared drive....

After over 80 million customers’ details were accessed in 2014 by cybercriminals, three men have been indicted on charges of computer hacking, securities fraud, wire fraud, identity theft, illegal internet gambling and conspiring to commit money laundering. 2 Israeli nationals and one US national were indicted in July. Two other individuals are also on bail in Florida.  The hack appeared to have little impact on JP Morgan’s share price at the time.   SOURCE: The...

Patches for two critical security vulnerabilities that affect every supported version of Windows were released yesterday, as part of Microsoft’s monthly security update strategy. One of the flaws was to do with memory corruption – allowing hackers administrator privileges on a machine i.e. the ability to install and uninstall programs or add/delete data. The second issue sprouted from how the OS works with fonts. There were various flaws with varying degrees of accessibility in this...

News emerged today that most apps in the Google Play Store can be reversed engineered and then have malicious code added to them. Hackers are then able to use the popularity of apps to spread their malware. Mobile security developer SEWORKS recently conducted a market analysis which highlighted the risk within the store. Among the findings, they found 85% of the top 200 free apps on Google Play are vulnerable to being decompiled. 95% of the...

The U.S. government recently lassoed together a bunch of intelligence streams inside an FBI website now implicated in an alleged hack of arrest records, personnel data and other confidential material. The goal of the revamp was to accelerate information sharing among authorized national security personnel, but the new arrangement may have sped too much data to the wrong people. Hacker activists claim to have broken into the Law Enforcement Enterprise Portal, or LEEP, a one-stop-shop for exchanging sensitive,...

Apple’s chief executive has sharply criticised surveillance powers proposed by the British government, warning that allowing spies a backdoor route into citizens’ communications could have “very dire consequences”. Questioning a key element of the draft investigatory powers bill, which places a new legal obligation on companies to assist in these operations to bypass encryption, Tim Cook insisted that companies had to be able to encrypt in order to protect people. Speaking during a visit to the...

Cybercrime is costing the Northern Ireland economy almost £100m a year, an accountancy firm has claimed. Grant Thornton said the largest cost was from frauds that had traditionally been offline, such as tax (£38m), welfare (£6m) and tax filing (£1.7m). Mike Harris of the firm said criminals were targeting businesses of all sizes as well as individuals. "For organisations, the key defence strategy is around employee awareness," he said. "Make sure they understand when cyber attacks are targeting...

An online criminal gang calling itself the "Armada Collective" has been demanding that online businesses pay thousands of dollars in Bitcoins, or face having their websites brought to their knees by crippling internet attacks. And, as the DDoS experts at Akamai point out, it is online companies who have the most to lose from downtime who are at the greatest risk. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Graham Cluley  

Demonstrating that financial gain can be a motivator for nefarious activity, 35 percent of employees were willing to sell their firm's intellectual property if the price was right. While most of these people held out for a high bid, three percent put that price at £100, 18 percent said it would take £1,000 to sway them and 29 percent required a heftier payout of £10,000, according to research by Clearswift. Just as troubling ,the study...