Top 10 Stories

Cybersecurity incidents in the federal government have skyrocketed by more than 1,000 percent in recent years, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office. The report — submitted as testimony by Greg Wilshusen, director of information security issues at GAO, in a recent congressional hearing — shows that in fiscal year 2014, federal agencies experienced 67,168 cybersecurity incidents involving personally identifiable information. The number of incidents has increased every year since fiscal year 2006,...

Professional cycling outfit Team Sky fears critics of team member and current Tour de France leader Chris Froome may have hacked into its systems and stolen training data. Froome's detractors have previously used power data in alleging the cyclist was using performance-enhancing drugs. The 30-year-old, who has always insisted he competes clean and has never failed a drug test, has dismissed interpretations of power data by non-experts (who he describes as "clowns"). Back in 2011,...

A year in the making, the automobile industry's new intelligence sharing and analysis center (ISAC) is now official and revving up to begin disseminating and exchanging cyber threat information later this year. Heightened concerns over the safety of a rapidly emerging generation of networked vehicles initially led the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and the Association of Global Automakers to first begin mulling an ISAC in July of 2014, when they announced plans to address security...

A new contactless payment system that lets people use their iPhones to tap-and-pay in high street shops has been launched in the UK. Apple Pay will let iPhone 6, 6 Plus and Apple Watch owners pay for items costing up to £20 by just touching their gadgets to a payment terminal, much like contactless credit cards. The UK launch marks the first expansion of Apple’s contactless payment system beyond the US, where it rolled out...

CFOs’ long-term outlook for the North American economy remains strong despite their weakening confidence in their own companies' prospects, according to Deloitte. Lower expectations for growth in revenue, earnings, and domestic hiring appear to be behind this declining sentiment. Surveyed CFOs are concerned about a number of internal and external risks. Externally, issues that continue to be challenging for CFOs include global economic concerns like risks associated with trade and FX impacts of central banks’...

Amid recent security issues hounding Adobe's Flash plugin, the software has been blocked in Mozilla's open-source browser Firefox. Mozilla head of Firefox support announced the policy in a post on his Twitter account before noon Tuesday (PHL time). Mozilla's support page told Firefox users the Flash Player plugin 18.0.0.203 (click-to-play) was "blocked for your protection." "When Mozilla becomes aware of add-ons, plugins, or other third-party software that seriously compromises Firefox security, stability, or performance and meets...

Popular messaging platform Telegram has been hit with a 200Gbps distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The Tsunami TCP SYN flood kicked off on Friday and hurt users in Asia, Australia, and Oceania, knocking out the service for some five percent of the company's 60 million active users it has gained in 18 months. It is a new form of DDoS attack discovered October by Radware security folk who say it is different from regular...

Hackers appear to have stolen the entire user database of cloud-based Bitcoin mining outfit Cloudminr.io and are offering to sell 79,267 accounts including passwords for a single Bitcoin. The Norwegian company's website is offline and criminal advertisements showcasing some of the CSV database of members has popped up on web clipboards like Pastebin. Despite their removal, some are still accessible in web caches. The account information could be used to access Bitcoin wallets if Cloudminr.io...

The chief of Italian spy-ware firm Hacking Team has spoken out for the first time about the huge recent hack of the company's databses – which has exposed severe software security holes and gifted terrorists with zero-day exploits, among other things. David Vincenzetti, in an interview with La Stampa newspaper, claimed his firm would recover from the attack and alleged that an unnamed government or organisation with "considerable funds" had infiltrated its data servers and...

US government CIO Tony Scott ordered federal agencies to complete 30-day "cyber sprints" to patch holes in their security in the wake of the Office of Personnel Management hack that exposed personal details of 22 million Americans. He warned federal government could find more cyber intrusions as it takes a close look at its sprawling and sometimes creaky systems. "I think it's a realistic chance, and I think this is true no matter where you...