Top 10 Stories

The fourth iteration of the world's worst ransomware Cryptowall has surfaced with gnarlier encryption tactics and better evasion tricks that have fooled current antivirus platforms. Ransomware has ripped through scores of businesses and end-user machines in sporadic and targeted attacks that have cost victims millions of dollars in ransom payments made to criminals who have illegally encrypted valuable files. The worst offenders remain at large including a single group who may be behind Cryptowall 3.0 and have...

Apple Pay users that store other people's fingerprints on their iPhones might find their terms and conditions agreement voided, banks warned. The Apple Pay system, launched in the UK in July, uses Apple's Touch ID – the company's fingerprint scanning technology used for unlocking iPhones – to authorise retail transactions. While iPhone users can store as many as 10 fingerprints on some iPhones – to allow family members to share their devices – these settings could create several...

A group of teenage hackers going by the name of “Crackas With Attitude” (CWA) are on a rampage, breaking into federal systems to embarrass the U.S. government. After gaining access to the personal AOL email account of CIA Director John Brennan last month, the teenagersreportedly broke into the Comcast email account of FBI Deputy Director Mark Giuliana’s wife, dumped personal details of thousands of government employees and then claimed to have gained access to the national Joint Automated Booking...

Results of a new research show that 73% of Android apps share users email addresses and 47% of iOS apps share location data with the third-parties. These findings were discovered in a research named “Who knows what about me”, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard, and Carnegie-Mellon universities which studied 110 apps available on Google Play and the Apple App Store, says BBC. In most cases, the Android Apps would leak data to Google and Facebook and most of...

Hackers have stolen customer data from Touchnote which makes an app that lets people turn a photo taken on a phone into a postcard. The company has sent an email to customers hit by the breach informing them that data has been stolen. In a statement, Touchnote said names, email and home addresses were taken in the attack. It said it was still investigating the breach and, so far, was not sure how many customers had been...

The same “stoner teens” who hacked CIA director John Brennan’s AOL account are back. Today, “Crackas With Attitude” posted the contact information of government employees online–and they claim to have accessed far more than that. “34,000 lines of emails, names, position and phone numbers of gov associates, including military,” one of the hackers bragged about how many government names they bagged. His account is now deleted. Motherboard spoke to the hackers, who claim they gained access...

Anonymous has shared details of about 1,000 alleged Ku Klux Klan (KKK) sympathisers on the internet. It follows threats from the white supremacist KKK to use "deadly force" against those protesting about the killing of a black teenager in Missouri Anonymous, a loose coalition of hackers, said the data was "a form of resistance" against racial violence. A list of alleged KKK members published earlier in the week appears to have been bogus. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE:...

Do you remember the bad old days of computer viruses so invasive that it was easier to nuke your software and start over than fix the problem? They're back... in mobile form. Lookout has noticed a trend toward Android malware that masquerades as a popular app, but quietly gets root-level access to your phone and buries itself deep in the operating system. If that happens, you're in serious trouble. Unless you can walk through loading...

A Scottish man has been indicted by a federal grand jury in San Francisco for using Twitter to make bogus claims that drove down the stock prices of two companies, in an effort to profit from illegal trading. James Alan Craig, 62, of Dunragit, Scotland, was charged with one count of securities fraud. A similar charge was filed by the US Securities and Exchange Commission in a related civil case. The charges laid on Thursday mark the...

Malfeasants have embedded a phishing scam inside the Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria's web site.  The Council is legit: it's Nigeria's accounting standards and corporate governance oversight organisation. That role, says Netcraft, doesn't make it a wizard at information security, because someone's found their way in to an images directory on the Council's web site and planted a phish there. The scam asks for users email address and password, and the phone number used as backup...