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Major intrusions by Chinese hackers of US companies' computer systems appear to have slowed in recent months, private-sector experts say, ahead of a meeting between China's president and President Barack Obama with cybersecurity on the agenda. Three senior executives at private-sector firms in the field told Reuters they had noticed a downtick in hacking activity. "The pace of new breaches feels like it’s tempering," said Kevin Mandia, founder of Mandiant, a prominent company that investigates sophisticated corporate...

The average budget required to recover from a security breach is $551,000 USD for enterprises, and $38,000 for small and medium businesses according to Kaspersky Lab. Based on a worldwide survey of 5,500 companies conducted in cooperation with B2B International, the survey concluded the most expensive types of security breach are employee fraud, cyber-espionage, network intrusion and the failure of third party suppliers. Nine out of ten companies that took part in the survey reported...

The Kremlin has reportedly been hit by what they have described as a "very powerful" distributed denial of service attack - also known as a DDoS attack. The attack is reported to have targeted the nation's electoral commission. A similar attack was made on Sunday, which targeted the official website of Russian president, Vladimir Putin. As many as 50,000 requests per minute were made in the attacks, according to Vladimir Churov, chairman of Russia's electoral...

Russian hackers cop to Heartland breach and two men are arrested in connection with a major ransomware scheme -- but meanwhile, the hacking beat goes on. It was a rare good week for law enforcement in the ongoing battle against cybercrime as officials broke open two high-profile cases:  first, two Russian nationals pleaded guilty to their role in the historic data breach in 2008 of Heartland Payment Systems and other companies, and then a pair...

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks cause far-ranging damage, but research suggests that they also open the door to secondary attacks. About a third of DDoS hits are accompanied by network breaches. According to respondents in a survey by Kaspersky Lab, 32% of serious DDoS attacks coincided with a network intrusion. Although it is hard to trace two different attacks to a single source, survey results provide evidence that DDoS attacks may lead to additional...

The U.S. Defense Department is building a massive, electronic system to provide an overview of the vulnerabilities of the military's computer networks, weapons systems, and installations, and help officials prioritize how to fix them, the deputy commander of U.S. Cyber Command said on Thursday. Air Force Lieutenant General Kevin McLaughlin told Reuters officials should reach agreement on a framework within months, with a goal of turning the system into an automated "scorecard" in coming years....

Police injury reports, drug tests, detailed doctor visit notes, social security numbers—all were inexplicably unveiled on a public subdomain ofAmazon Web Services. Welcome to the next big data breach horrorshow. Instead of hackers, it’s old-fashioned neglect that exposed your most sensitive information. Texas tech enthusiast Chris Vickery had heard strange data dumps could turn up on Amazon’s cloud computing platform, so he started combing through. In early September, he found an enormous data breach that...

Attackers have hijacked thousands of websites running the WordPress content management system and are using them to infect unsuspecting visitors with potent malware exploits, researchers said Thursday. The campaign began 15 days ago, but over the past 48 hours the number of compromised sites has spiked, from about 1,000 per day on Tuesday to close to 6,000 on Thursday, Daniel Cid, CTO of security firm Sucuri, said in a blog post. The hijacked sites are...

Apple's latest version of iOS – iOS 9 – is out today with new features and security fixes. A lot of security fixes: 101 potentially exploitable bugs, we count. If you've got a compatible device, you may well want to upgrade sooner rather than later – certainly before people start trying to exploit these security holes. View full story

The Obama Administration is weighing whether to come out in full support of unfettered encryption, something that would be a huge blow to the Feds, who have been pushing for compulsory backdoors in all new tech. But there's something in the President's proposals that aren't quite right. A leaked memo from the National Security Council (NSC), seen and published by The Washington Post, outlines three options over what to do regarding the issue. The first...