Top 10 Stories

Microsoft's MSN web portal has been used by unknown attackers to serve up malicious advertising code that attempted to plant the Angler Exploit Kit on visitors' computers. MSN is the default home page for Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser in its Windows operating system, and the company claims several hundreds of millions of visitors click through to the site every month. Researcher Jérôme Segura from security firm Malwarebytes reported users were served the malvertising when they simply browsed...

BitTorrent has fixed a flaw in its technology that quietly turns file-sharing networks into weapons capable of blasting websites and other internet servers offline. The San Francisco company said Thursday the patch for its libuTP software will stop miscreants from abusing the peer-to-peer protocol to launch distributed reflective denial-of-service (DRDoS) attacks. LibuTP is an essential building block for BitTorrent apps, such as Vuze, uTorrent, Transmission and the BitTorrent's own client software. These applications must be...

The FBI today warned about a significant spike in victims and dollar losses stemming from an increasingly common scam in which crooks spoof communications from executives at the victim firm in a bid to initiate unauthorized international wire transfers. According to the FBI, thieves stole nearly $750 million in such scams from more than 7,000 victim companies in the U.S. between October 2013 and August 2015. In January 2015, the FBI released stats showing that between Oct....

Morgan Culbertson, a former engineering student at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), pleaded guilty Tuesday in a Pittsburgh federal court to developing and marketing malware capable of remotely controlling Android phones, including enlisting the phones' cameras to spy on owners, reports indicated. The 20-year-old interned as an anti-malware professional at FireEye. Concurrently, known on the underground forum Darkode as “Android,” he peddled Dendroid, a remote access trojan (RAT), for $300. View full story

An independent data researcher had originally discovered a massive data dump released byWikiLeaks to contain malware in torrent files made available by the whistleblowing website. Since then, the researcher has also confirmed that some of the files taken from the dump and now hosted on WikiLeaks.org are also malware infected. Josh Wieder, a system administrator by trade, garnered attention from multiple newspapers and outlets around the world in April 2015. With a keen eye and...

It's easy to laugh-and-point at Samsung over its latest smart-thing disaster: after all, it should have already learned its lesson from the Smart TV debacle, right? Except, of course, that wherever you see “Smart Home”, “Internet of Things”, “cloud” and “connected” in the same press release, there's a security debacle coming. It might be Nest, WeMo, security systems, or home gateways – but it's all the same. Why? Let me introduce someone I'll call the...

When hackers released password data for more than 36 million Ashley Madison accounts last week, big-league cracking expert Jeremi Gosney didn't bother running them through one of his massive computer clusters built for the sole purpose of password cracking. The reason: the passwords were protected by bcrypt, a cryptographic hashing algorithm so strong Gosney estimated it would take years using a highly specialized computer cluster just to check the dump for the top 10,000 most...

Agora, one of the biggest online black markets, has shut down because of security concerns, its website reports. The site said fears that a recently discovered flaw in the network on which it runs could lead to Agora's servers being located, were behind the move. Administrators said they would keep the site offline until they could come up with a long-term solution. According to one expert, the issue showed that users could not entirely trust...

A man has been jailed for 18 months for hacking into 900 phones belonging to the insurance company Aviva. Richard Neale, 40, pleaded guilty to carrying out the attack as revenge after falling out with colleagues. He was previously a director at Esselar, a company contracted by Aviva to run its security network. Prosecutors said data had been wiped on hundreds of devices. View full story

More than a million UK marriage-cheat hacking victims are being targeted by predatory blackmailers. Criminals are attempting to exploit customers of the Ashley Madison website whose details were leaked by hackers. Information from 33 million accounts worldwide was stolen from the site, which offers to help users have an affair. View full story