Top 10 Stories

As many as 600 million Samsung phones may be vulnerable to attacks that allow hackers to surreptitiously monitor the camera and microphone, read incoming and outgoing text messages, and install malicious apps, a security researcher said. View full story

Following disclosures of devastating breaches of US government computer networks, officials told lawmakers Tuesday even more intrusions may be discovered with investigations and deployment of new security tools. View full story

Researchers with Dell SecureWorks' Counter Threat Unit (CTU) this week detailed the kind of Spy-vs.-Spy countermeasures malware authors come up with to evade detection in a new report on a little-known malware family it calls Stegoloader. View full story

Hacker Joseph Redfern has reported a privacy flaw at UK telco Three, which exposed names and email addresses in online surveys. The telco shuttered the offending survey site and the exposed API which returned the private information in JSON forms when a user entered data. View full story

Trustwave released a new report which reveals the top cybercrime, data breach and security threat trends from 2014. They gathered the data from 574 breach investigations the SpiderLabs team conducted in 2014 across 15 countries in addition to threat intelligence gleaned from the company’s global SOCs, security scanning and penetration testing results, telemetry from security technologies and security research. View full story

A British company has launched an emoji alternative to the traditional four-digit Pin code commonly used for accessing online banking. Intelligent Environments says its Emoji Passcode service is more secure because there are more potential combinations of the 44 emojis than there are of the numbers 0-9. View full story

Russia is leading the way, as new technology is combined with old spying techniques. IN hacker jargon, a ‘cyber-to-physical effect’ is when a hacker reaches out from the virtual world into the real one — often with catastrophic consequences. The Americans and Israelis pioneered the technique in 2009, when the Stuxnet programme infiltrated Iranian computer systems and wrecked thousands of uranium-enriching centrifuges. View full story

Guess who has been advertising for zero-day vulnerabilities? As EFF researcher Dave Maass uncovered, the United States Navy's Naval Supply Systems Command posted a request for vulnerabilities on FedBizOpps.gov, a site used by government agencies to post contracts on. View full story

Password-storing cloud biz LastPass is urging its users to change their master passwords after hackers broke into its network. The intrusion reportedly happened on Friday afternoon, but many LastPass users are only learning about it now. LastPass last had a security scare in 2011. View full story

When a retired 51-year-old military man disclosed in a U.S. security clearance application that he had a 20-year affair with his former college roommate's wife, it was supposed to remain a secret between him and the government. The disclosure last week that hackers had penetrated a database containing such intimate and possibly damaging facts about millions of government and private employees has shaken Washington. View full story