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The Department of Defense is taking a number of steps to up its cybersecurity game, Terry Halvorsen, the Pentagon's Chief Information Officer recently told a reporters breakfast hosted by The Christian Science Monitor. "There's not a time when I'm not being attacked somewhere in the world," Halvorsen said. "We're looking to industry to help us solve some specific areas." To that end, the DoD has begun assigning its civilian personnel to 6-month tours of private...

A team of security researchers may have found a way to remotely penetrate the defenses of Apple's latest mobile OS, making them eligible for a $1 million reward. The money was offered in a contest run by a Washington, D.C.-based company called Zerodium, which is in the controversial business of buying and selling information about software vulnerabilities. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE:

More than 500 websites that used a free analytics service inadvertently exposed their visitors to a nasty malware attack made possible by a hack of PageFair, the anti-adblocking company that provided the analytics. The compromise started in the last few minutes of Halloween with a spearphishing e-mail that ultimately gave the attackers access to PageFair's content distribution network account. The attacker then reset the password and replaced the JavaScript code PageFair normally had execute on...

No one reads those interminable terms of service agreements on Instagram, WhatsApp and their like. But they could make the difference between life and death, according to Rebecca MacKinnon. “It may be about whether you get tortured for what you wrote on Facebook or not, or whether you get tried based on some of the stuff you had in your text messages or something you uploaded. They’re worth a lot to human beings,” said MacKinnon,...

While Website owners may have noticed the need to get rid of old, buggy or weak crypto, those operating e-mail servers seem to be operating on autopilot. Not in a good way, either: the world of e-mail is headed for “controlled flight into terrain” if sysadmins don't grab the controls and get to work, the researchers from Austria's SBA Research and the St Pölten University of Applied Sciences say. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: The Register

A Kaspersky Lab report has announced that 323,374 new malicious mobile programs were detected by Kaspersky Lab mobile security products in Q3. This is a 10.8% increase on Q2 2015 and a 3.1-fold increase since Q1 2015. It also reported that there were more than 1.5 million malicious packages installed on mobiles during the quarter, 1.5 times more than in the previous quarter. It appears that adverts are the most popular method of penetration, with malicious...

PayPal's services were down for roughly 2 hours on Thursday night, due to a fault in one of the online payment provider's data centres. The company reported a power outage to be the root of the issue. PayPal processes around $26 million per hour, meaning that there is a risk tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars could have been lost. Twitter went into a storm of rage as businesses and individuals vented their...

In three pasted posts on the @YouAnonNews Twitter account, hacktivist group Anonymous began revealing the personal details of KKK members. Posts have included phone numbers and email addresses, without names. It has included some 800- numbers and email addresses on the .ru domain. Not all the phone numbers are registered to individuals - however one number used has been associated with the KKK by people making "threatening" calls from it. Some of the data appears...

The UK and US' biggest banks will simulate a cyber-attack as officials investigate the sector's strength in resisting threats of computer hackers targeting the financial industry. Operation Resilient Shield, as the operation has been named, is intended to be the most sophisticated test of network infrastructure and communications yet. Previous tests have tested banking personnel and institutions in the UK alone - the new dimension is adding US institutions to the trial, to assess how...

A third suspect was arrested on Saturday following the data breach at TalkTalk by police, under the Computer Misuse Act. The communications provider has said it has a greater assessment of the situation and estimates less data was exposed than originally thought. The man has since been bailed. The 20-year old man, who is from Staffordshire, has not been named. The two other arrests following the incident were of a 15 year-old in County Antrim...