Top 10 Stories

Hacktivist collective Anonymous has leaked information about police, army and government officials as well as defacing multiple media websites in support of those protesting against the government of Nawaz Sharif in Pakistan.   Launching the campaign, Anonymous said: "We will initiate the process of removing every vestige of the Pakistan government from the Internet and shutting down their communications network”, according to IB Times   The campaign in Pakistan follows a similar campaign against the Israeli...

4Chan has said it will enact a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) policy to let content owners get illegally shared material removed.   According to BBC news, it will now remove content after it gets a "bona fide infringement" notice.   Before now, image-sharing site 4Chan has largely avoided having to actively police many of its discussions boards because of the frenetic nature of the site itself. An upper limit on the amount of material...

Testing the ability of 18,000 business users globally in detecting online scams, the McAfee Phishing Quiz found that 79 per cent of the 1,755 UK participants failed to detect at least one of seven phishing emails.   Furthermore, results showed that finance and HR departments, those holding some of the most sensitive corporate data, performed the worst at detecting scams. Only seven per cent of business users were able to identify whether a set of...

Seventeen fake cellphone towers were discovered across the U.S. last week, according to a report in Popular Science.   Rather than offering you a cellphone service, the towers appear to be connecting to nearby phones, bypassing their encryption, and either tapping calls or reading texts.   The towers were found in July, but the report implied that there may have been more out there. Although it is unclear who owns the towers, ESD found that several...

MWR InfoSecurity is sponsoring the Capture the Flag (CTF) hacking challenge at this year's 44CON event.   Taking place in London next week at the ILEC Conference Centre in West Brompton, the 2014 CTF event has been designed and run by the 44Con Networking team and will focus on both infrastructure and application security flaws. The game will consist of pre-registered qualifiers and 44CON ticket-holders and the winner will be crowned "2014 MWR Labs 44CON CTF...

Apple share prices have tumbled following the iCloud security issue.   According to Huffington Post, shares were down by about four per cent at midday on Wednesday. Ahead of a new device launch, Apple stock had soared to new highs ahead of it, but Apple may or may not suddenly be "in disarray," in the words of Business Insider's Jim Edwards.   Most analysts on Wall Street still recommend investors shovel themselves some more shares of Apple....

The endorsement of an enhanced Nato cyber defence policy is expected to be one of the main outcomes of the two-day Newport summit.   In an update to the 2011 policy, Nato leaders will make an explicit link between cyber attacks at a certain threshold and the invocation of a Nato article 5 collective defence as part of the treaty, reported Computer Weekly.   Article 5 of the North Atlantic treaty requires member states to come to the aid...

According to Wired, researcher Brandon Dixon has tracked several high-profile hacking groups who used VirusTotal to hone their code and develop their tradecraft. He identified several distinct hackers or hacker teams as they used VirusTotal to refine their code. He’s even been able to identify some of their intended targets.   Every uploaded file leaves a trail of metadata available to subscribers of VirusTotal’s professional-grade service and the data includes the file’s name and a...

New figures from Dell SecureWorks suggest that the current market leader, CryptoWall, hasn't been as profitable as the infamous CryptoLocker despite infecting more PCs and holding hostage a staggering 5.25 billion files.   According to Computerworld UK, the firm now believes that CryptoLocker probably made around $3 million in ransoms, roughly three times the sums made by CryptoWall, which it estimates at $1.1 million. That is despite CryptoWall infecting at least 625,000 systems since its debut in...

Taking place on the 9th and 10th December at the Bloomsbury Hotel in London in partnership with MIS Training Institute, David Blunkett will begin the programme with insights into why the UK government elevated cyber security to a tier one threat.   Conference sessions cover current events, including the privacy issues hampering the UK's NHS data sharing scheme and real-world case studies from Euroclear, Ministry of Justice of Saudi Arabia, UBS, Dutch National Cyber Security...