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The US military is banning and blocking employees from visiting news website The Intercept in what it called an “apparent effort to censor news reports that contain leaked Government secrets”.   A notice has been circulated to units within the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps warning staff that they are prohibited from reading stories published by The Intercept on the grounds that they may contain classified information. The ban appears to apply to all employees—including...

The Heartbleed flaw is responsible for the high-impact US hospital hacking attack disclosed this week.   According to Bloomberg, an unnamed source blamed the Heartbleed OpenSSL bug for giving hackers a way into healthcare networks, after Community Health did not reveal how the hackers got in.   Tomi Galin, a spokeswoman for Community Health declined to comment on the use of Heartbleed in the attack. She said in an email that “no patient medical or...

To help tackle the rise in cybercrime, City of London Police has enlisted Kaspersky Lab to train its police officers at all levels on these ever-growing threats.   This training program, the first of its kind with UK law enforcement, will provide police with the skills and knowledge to identify and resolve these crimes – from an individual victim encountering fraud during an online shopping-spree to a business losing thousands of pounds from a targeted...

Kaspersky Lab announces the discovery of a new cyber-espionage campaign code-named ‘Machete’. This campaign has been targeting high profile victims, including Government, military, law enforcement agencies and embassies in Central and South America for at least four years. The objective of the attackers is to hijack sensitive information from the compromised organisations, and so far this threat actor has managed to successfully steal gigabytes of confidential data. All indications are that Machete started in 2010...

  Netflix streaming service hit by partial outage Disruption in nearly every geographical zone is preventing customers from viewing some content on Netflix.   Instead of their normal selections, many customers were presented with a limited number of shows and movies that could be accessed instead. It wasn't immediately clear how many customers were affected or when the outage occurred.    

What is it like to be a startup in a post-Edward Snowden world, I often wonder? The safety and security of users and their data feels more precarious than ever before.   When intelligence agencies can tap into Internet cables and private corporate servers, seemingly at will, how do you possibly defend against that? According to many in the field, you don’t. Not until you have to.   Despite the revelations, little has changed within...

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has been hacked three times in the past three years, a report has revealed.   According to Computer Weekly, two of the attacks were attributed to criminals of foreign descent, while the third attacker has not been identified.   The NRC maintains high-value data, including the location and condition of nuclear reactors, and inventories of plants that handle weapons-grade materials, but US agencies are not required to report data...

The US Government has said that it will not publicly disclose federal records that could shed light on the security of its health care website because doing so could "potentially" allow hackers to break in.   The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services denied a request by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act amid concerns that Republicans raised about the security of the website, which had technical glitches that prevented millions of...

A new piece of ransomware allegedly borrows components borrowed from other successful variants, and informs the victim that they have been encrypted by CryptoLocker.   Named TorrentLocker, it has unique code but the ransom message informs victims that their files have been encrypted by the "CryptoLocker virus," and the ransom page and the FAQ section look like the one from CryptoWall.   According to Security Week, while TorrentLocker lacks distinguishing features, other file encryptors employ...

Community Health Systems, which operates 206 hospitals across the United States, has announced that hackers recently broke into its computers and stole data on 4.5 million patients.   According to CNN, hackers accessed names, Social Security numbers, physical addresses, birthdays and telephone numbers and anyone who received treatment from a physician's office tied to a network-owned hospital in the last five years -- or was merely referred there by an outside doctor -- is affected....