Top 10 Stories

Microsoft has had "passionate" discussions about renaming Internet Explorer, according to answers from members of the developer team given in a Reddit session today.   As many still regard the browser with contempt, Arstechnica said that renaming the browser could be seen as a way of breaking from the past and distancing the new, actively maintained, standards-driven browser from this legacy.   The team was asked if it had considered such a renaming, and the answer was yes....

Google has added new capabilities to Chrome to protect users from downloading applications that appear to be safe and valid, but are actually malicious programs in disguise.   According to eweek, the changes are intended to help users more easily identify deceptive software programs that are disguised as helpful downloads, but which can actually make unexpected changes to a user's computer, such as switching his or her home page or other browser settings without consent.  ...

GCHQ is scanning servers in multiple foreign countries for vulnerable ports, according to German newspaper Heise.   It uses a tool called Hacienda, that can port scan all of the servers in a country to provide information on user endpoints and scan for potential vulnerabilities. The ability to port scan is not new, but the scale of its use by government spies, with 27 countries scanned by 2009, has surprised many familiar with the software, reports RT....

Australian’s state Government defences have been described as patchy and variable.   According to directorate cyber security chief Major General Stephen Day explained that since the Cyber Security Centre opened in 2010, it has been locked in “a daily struggle” against major cyber intrusions targeting Government intelligence and intellectual property, reports IT News.   State-sponsored attacks make up nearly half of the strikes he sees (48 per cent), followed by unidentifiable sources (40 per cent),...

Three separate investigations of Android's data deleting systems found it was possible to recover information in almost every instance.   Tesco's Hudl tablet was singled out as a particularly egregious offender, having been found to contain a flaw that let attackers get at data saved to onboard memory. That's because of a known bug in the Rockchip processor that powers the Hudl, reported IT Pro Portal.   The research was carried out on second-hand devices sold via auction sites such as eBay. Using...

Threat actors targeting Lockheed Martin immediately halted cyber attacks against the defence company following the release of Mandiant’s APT1 report, Lockheed executives said Wednesday.   According to Security Week, the threat actors immediately began curtailing their attacks after being called out and began to shift techniques, something that Lockheed witnessed in its own environment.    Charles “Charlie” Croom, VP of Cyber Strategy and Government Relations at Lockheed Martin Information Systems & Global Solution, said that...

Hacktivists summoned up a massive and previously undocumented 300Gbps DDoS attacks earlier this summer by exploiting an obscure motherboard-level flaw on 100,000 unpatched servers, according to VeriSign.   As reported by Techworld, an unidentified data centre found itself on the receiving end of a determined DDoS “siege”, which started with a three-hour SYN and TCP flood, a standard softening up process.   After mitigation, the attackers changed tack not long after to use large UDP...

A new cyber defense system being developed by the NSA could automatically launch counter-strikes against attackers who target the US.   According to whistle blower Edward Snowden and reported by Infosecurity, the MonsterMind project, still under development at the spy agency, features algorithms which would automatically scan vast chunks of metadata with the aim of picking out malicious traffic.   With that intelligence the NSA system could then neutralize the threat and even theoretically launch...

A crypto currency thief hijacked traffic that was meant for large hosting companies including Amazon, Digital Ocean, OVH, and others earlier this year in a heist that earned him some $83,000 in profits in more than four months, according toDark Reading.   Researchers with Dell SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit said that some 51 networks were compromised from 19 internet service providers as the thief redirected crypto currency miners to his own mining pool and stole...

Gartner has urged endpoint computing managers and CIOs to begin their migration from Windows 7 now to avoid the problems many faced when migrating from Windows XP.   In a blog post, Stephen Kleynhans, research vice president at Gartner, announced that the end of support for Windows 7 will be January, 2020, assuming there are no changes to its current support life cycle. “While this feels like it's a long way off, organisations must start planning now, so they can...