Top 10 Stories

Detectives have visited hundreds of convicted fraudsters in prison to find out how they carried out their crimes, City of London Police has said. Commissioner Adrian Leppard said the information helped disrupt cybercrime and reduce the number of victims. The prisoners were not rewarded with reduced sentences, he told the BBC. Police have always spoken to convicted criminals, but the force's widespread use of the practice since 2012 is thought to be unprecedented. City of...

Human traffickers, crowd-sourcing murderers, child pornographers, and governments in the market for juicy zero-days are flooding the Dark Web -- making it hard for the good guys to defend it. It can take 30 seconds to load just one webpage on the Darknet. There are only between 200,000 and 400,000 sites in it, but good luck finding the one you want when the only things that remotely resemble search engines are full of phony or...

China opposes Internet attacks and wants to work with the United States in cyberspace but will defend its interests, a senior Chinese official said on Thursday after U.S. President Barack Obama warned of a forceful response to Beijing over hacking. Tensions over cyber security will take center stage during a trip by Chinese President Xi Jinping to Washington next week, Xi's first state visit to the United States. Obama told executives on Wednesday the United...

Twitter is being sued for invading users' privacy over its practice of replacing hyperlinks in direct messages with its own "t.co" short links. Californian Wilford Raney filed a class action lawsuit against the company in San Francisco this week and is seeking millions of dollars in damages. Backdoored Business Routers An Emerging ThreatAccording to Raney, Twitter represents that its direct messages, or DMs, are entirely private between users, but in reality the company "reads" all...

Software bugs that allow attackers to bypass smartphone lockscreens are common enough for both Android and iOS devices, but like a fender bender on the highway, many of us can't resist the urge to gawk anyway. There's a newly disclosed way for someone who has a few uninterrupted moments with a handset running most versions of Android 5.x to gain complete control of the device and all the data stored on it. The hack involves dumping an extremely long string into...

The US Department of Justice says a Russian national, Vladimir Drinkman, has just coughed to being part of a ring that compromised as many as 160 million credit cards two years ago. Drinkman was one of five people charged in 2013 over the mass breach, in which they breached card security at names like NASDAQ, 7-Eleven, and Dow Jones. Just three of the targets suffered losses amounting to US$300 million, the original indictment said. Now,...

Vodafone is facing mounting pressure over the potentially unlawful access of a journalist’s phone records, as more details of a leaked email emerged that alleged a manager in the company instructed investigators to “use any means available” to track down the journalist’s source. The company has admitted that investigators accessed Fairfax journalist Natalie O’Brien’s call and text records in 2011 after she broke a story about a serious data breach within Vodafone. After it initially...

PandaLabs has confirmed a record increase in the creation of new malware samples. In the second quarter of 2015 alone there were an average of 230,000 new malware samples detected each day, which means a total of 21 million new types in these three months. Compared to the same period last year, where there were 160,000 registered samples, this is an increase of 43%. The majority of these samples are variants of known malware, mutated...

GCHQ has declined to comment on a report in the Daily Telegraph this weekend, which claimed that UK cabinet ministers' emails had been hacked, but that – bafflingly – no breach had occurred. Which is a bit like saying "nothing happened, but we're going to write a story anyway." Spokesbeings at Britain's eavesdropping nerve centre told The Register on Sunday morning that GCHQ doesn't "comment on intelligence matters". We could go on to tell you...

A security researcher discovered a serious yet simple flaw in VxWorks, a real-time operating system for the Internet of Things, which an attacker could remotely exploit without needing any interaction with a user. The OS is used in everyday things like network routers to critical infrastructure as well in NASA’s Curiosity Rover on Mars and Boeing 787 Dreamliners. Searching for VxWorks via Shodan reveals about 100,000 internet-connected devices running the OS, but VxWorks supposedly powers...