Top 10 Stories

The FBI has recently issued a renewed warning about what it calls the Business Email Compromise, a scam being used against companies that use wire transfers for payments of bills of foreign suppliers. Like so many scams and security breaches, from that of Target to the recently discovered data breach at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), this scam generally starts with socially engineered phishing. Phishing occurs when someone receives an email that lures the...

Trump Hotel Collection has confirmed in a letter to customers that IT security at one of its Las Vegas hotels was breached. News emerged in July of a possible breach at the US chain owned by real estate magnate and Republican candidate Donald Trump. It was suspected at the time based on intelligence from bank fraud sleuths that Trump's hotels in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Las Vegas and Miami were breached View full...

UK SPY AGENCY GCHQ has been accused of being even more nosey, a Radiohead fan, and of being a bit of a nuisance when it comes to privacy. GCHQ has excelled itself in the snooping stakes, according to a report on The Intercept, a news site that is close to Edward Snowden, and thus close to this kind of revelation. The report said, quite simply, that the aim of the Karma Police system is to...

Security firm Silent Circle has revamped its smartphone that helps people manage personal data. The Blackphone 2 adds software to the basic Android operating system so people can fine tune what each app, service and site can know about them. The phone costs $799 (£525) and is aimed at businesses keen to oversee the information employees expose. The launch comes as Blackberry readies an Android phone that also has improved privacy features. Blackphone 2 owners...

If you’ve stayed at a Hilton hotel this year, you may want to check your bank records. The hotel chain admitted on Saturday that it was investigating claims that hackers have compromised sales registers in Hilton Hotels and a number of its franchises. The first public suggestion of the breach came on Friday in the from orspeculation by Krebs on Security. Brian Krebs wrote that a number of financial institutions have warned of a security...

The world's most popular pirate torrent site KickAss Torrents is serving scareware advertising, helping dodgy call centre operators con users into handing over remote access to their machines. KickAss Torrents gained the top spot among movie, TV, and software pirates after the temporary scuppering of the Pirate Bay, which spawned multiple mirrors and dispersed visitors. ranked62 According to SimilarWeb KickAss Torrents is attracting some 332.5 million visitors a month. The Pirate Bay's major .la mirror...

CloudFlare has turned up an unusual form of denial-of-service attack: mobile advertisements that are pumping out around 275,000 HTTP requests per second. The cloud outfit didn't name the victim, but said the Layer 7 HTTP floods hitting the target is the latest example of a once-theoretical attack turning up in the real world. London CloudFlare engineer Marek Majkowski says the difficulty in turning HTTP floods into a real attack was overcome using malicious JavaScript in...

A fresh strain of ATM malware dubbed GreenDispenser is being used by hackers to drain cash from infected machines, according to researchers at security firm Proofpoint. Once installed, the malware can display an "out of service" message on the ATM, yet attackers remain able to enter a specific PIN to drain money from the machine and even erase the malware by using a "deep delete" process. Evidence suggests that GreenDispenser, which so far has only affected...

A massive malvertising attack is striking adult content portals, including top porn domain xHamster.com which has close to half a billion monthly visitors. The malicious advertisement was being served by TrafficHaus (it has since been removed), and was for a dating application called “Sex Messenger.” Malwarebytes Labs found that it was displayed often enough to reliably reproduce the infection—and found that this attack, like others in the same campaign, infects a user’s machine with ransomware via...

Among companies experiencing data breaches (and that is to say, a majority), internal actors were responsible for 43% of data loss, half of which was intentional, and half accidental. That’s a staggering amount of risk lingering inside organizations, especially when one considers that the report, from Intel, also revealed that security professionals have experienced an average of six significant security breaches each. Interestingly, insider threats aren’t recognized as the gaping issue that they are. Breaches...