Top 10 Stories

Vaizey, minister of state at the department for culture, media and sport (DCM) and the department for business, innovation and skills (BIS), was the keynote speaker at an event hosted by think-tank Reform in London today, where he announced several new government initiatives while also talking up its digitalisation efforts and local cyber-security companies. He opened by saying that the digital economy, and the opportunities that can arise from the likes of driverless cars, blockchain...

Documents laced with malware have been found in WikiLeaks.org's cache of files obtained from hacked CIA wannabe Stratfor. Intelligence biz Stratfor was ransacked by Jeremy Hammond in late 2011, and its email archives passed to whistleblowing website WikiLeaks in early 2012. The Julian Assange™-led organization soon began distributing the archives using the BitTorrent file-sharing network, and publishing extracts on its website. In March 2015, WikiLeaks made the emails available in a handy searchable database, just...

Some of the world's most popular apps permit unlimited brute force password guessing attempts. The 53 exposed Android and Apple apps, collectively downloaded more than 600 million times, include SoundCloud, ESPN, CNN, Expedia, and Walmart. So far of the 15 apps named a dozen have failed to fix the server-side flaws after being given 30 days to act ahead of disclosure. The remaining apps will be named 30 July. Developers for the popular apps Wunderlist,...

You might have seen USB keys that act as U2F, or Universal Two-Factor, tools to authenticate your online identity. They're handy little devices that add a second layer of protection to your web-based desktop or laptop activities. They're also easy to lose. Why bother carrying a small authentication dongle when you can use something else that you likely already have with you? That's the question the Fast IDentity Online (FIDO) Alliance and Bluetooth SIG ask...

Collaboration is the main way cyber security threats will be beaten, according to Chris Gibson, director of UK national computer emergency response team (Cert-UK). This is the driving factor behind the Cert-UK’s cyber security information sharing partnership (Cisp), which is aimed at jump-starting greater collaboration around cyber threats in the UK. “The Cisp uniquely provides the opportunity to see what is happening across all industry sectors, join the dots and share insights,” Gibson told Westminster...

The huge cache of internal files recently leaked from the controversial Italian surveillance software company Hacking Team has now revealed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)purchased surveillance software from the company. The leaked documents contains more than 1 Million internal emails, including emails from FBI agent who wanted to unmask the identity of a user of Tor, the encrypted anonymizing network widely used by activists to keep their identities safe, but also used to...

Before Max Krohn, the OkCupid co-founder, played online matchmaker, he had a far-less-romantic interest in cryptography. But he couldn’t see a way to make a living at it. “Security startups never really did so well,” says Mr. Krohn, who studied computer science at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “There was not an example of a runaway success.” That is changing, following major data breaches, as corporate customers and venture capitalists show increased...

Oracle has poured cold coffee on a recent Java zero-day that's already under active attack, with just one of the critical patches it's released to address 193 holes in its sprawling product suite. The zero day is the most urgent fix of the lot and of the two dozen other Java patches present among Big Red's quarterly patch release. Trend Micro researchers Brooks Li and Feike Hacquebord reported the flaw 13 July noting it is...

Windows XP holdouts are even more danger than ever after Microsoft abandoned anti-malware support for the ancient platform. Redmond overnight stopped providing XP support for new and existing installs of its Security Essentials package. The run-as-needed Malicious Software Removal Tool has also been axed, while support for patching ended in April last year for those who aren't paying large wads of cash to stave off an upgrade. "Please note that since the above real-time protection...

Kaspersky Lab has detected curious behavior in a new threat from the TeslaCrypt ransomware encryptor family. In version 2.0 of the Trojan notorious for infecting computer gamers, it displays an HTML page in the web browser which is an exact copy of CryptoWall 3.0, another ransomware program. Perhaps the criminals are doing this as a statement of intent: so far, many files encrypted by CryptoWall could not be decrypted, which is not the case with...