Top 10 Stories

Several sources in the financial industry say they are seeing a spike in fraud on customer cards used at ATMs in Mexico. The reason behind that apparent increase hopefully will be fodder for another story. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at a pair of ATM skimming devices that were found this month attached to a cash machine in Puerto Vallarta — a popular tourist destination on Mexico’s Pacific coast. On Saturday, July 18,...

Microsoft's Advanced Threat Analytics is going general-availability next month, so – as Redmond says – enterprises can more quickly spot intruders in their networks. Since the last preview version, ATA engineering head Idan Plotnik says the framework has 13 new features to make it more scalable, with improved threat detection. "After deployment, ATA immediately starts analysing all AD related network traffic, collecting information about entities from AD, and collecting relevant events from your Security Information...

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson yesterday confirmed that he and 28 senior staffers have been using private web-based email on work computers for the last year. Private email was banned from DHS computers in April 2014—after Office of Personnel Management (OPM) computers were breached. Now that he’s been caught by media for bending the rules, Johnson said that he plans to use his smartphone to access his personal Gmail account from now on....

Two renowned automobile hackers - security researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek - have done it again. They've previously hacked a Toyota Prius and a Ford Escape, and now they've hacked a Jeep Cherokee. Except this time, instead of taking over a vehicle's systems by plugging directly into a car's network (called the CAN bus) via a port under the dashboard, the pair have discovered a way to take over a car remotely. Miller and Valasek,...

An iOS ‘technical support’ scam first spotted in the US has made its way across the Atlantic, threatening to defraud Apple users by claiming that their device has crashed. Some iPhone and iPad users have reported seeing a pop-up error message on their screens whilst browsing in Safari. It reads as follows: **** IOS Crash Report **** IOS crashed previously due to unwanted websites visit. There is a problem with the configuration of your IOS....

Big-three credit bureau Experian is the target of a class-action lawsuit just filed in California. The suit alleges that Experian negligently violated consumer protection laws when it failed to detect for nearly 10 months that a customer of its data broker subsidiary was a scammer who ran a criminal service that resold consumer data to identity thieves. The lawsuit comes just days after a judge in New Hampshire handed down a 13-year jail sentence against Hieu Minh...

As most know, the majority of US businesses must transition to EMV-capable technologies for credit cards by Oct. 1, or become liable for any costs incurred from fraud using old magnetic-strip technologies. As the transition deadline looms, research shows that 42% of IT decision makers, including C-level executives, have either taken no steps or are unaware of any progress being made to meet the mandate. According to a survey on EMV readiness from Randstad Technologies,...

Google ad man Vegard Johnsen says tech big wigs including Facebook and Yahoo! have forged a giant blacklist to block fake web traffic contributing to advertising fraud. The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) pilot program will nix bot traffic using a blacklist which could cut a significant portion of web traffic; Google's DoubleClick blacklist alone blocked some 8.9 percent of traffic. "The newly shared blacklist identifies web robots that are being run in data centers but...

On July 17th, there was a police-involved shooting in Dawson Creek, British Columbia Canada, where one of the members of hacktivist group Anonymous was killed. On the following day, members of the international activist group Anonymous reportedly claimed that they have crashed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police RCMP’s website as a part of a battle to retaliate their decreased “comrade.” They have also threatened to expose the identity of the RCMP officer who was involved in the...

A serious flaw in an online form left personal data of applicants for Italian visas exposed – a flaw discovered by chance after a user was trying to retrieve a saved application. VFS Global, which provides visa services for governments around the world, produced an online form that used sequential reference numbers. As two Russians living in the UK discovered when using the site to apply for holiday visas, they could enter another person's reference...