Top 10 Stories

US Federal law enforcement and intelligence authorities are increasingly struggling to conduct court-ordered wiretaps on suspects, because of a surge secure communications which require technical means to be intercepted.   According to the Washington Post, this is leading to a “large percentage” of wiretap orders not being fulfilled, FBI officials said. Law enforcement agents are citing the same challenge in criminal cases; agents, they say, often decline to even seek orders when they know firms...

Customers affected by the eBay breach are seeking legal advice.   According to ITnews, eBay is facing a class action lawsuit after US citizen Collin Green filed a consumer privacy class action suit in US District Court, accusing the e-commerce company of failing to secure private information.   The suit noted that eBay “holds personal information of more than 120 million active customers in electronic files," and because the company didn't protect the data properly...

After a plea last week at the launch of its report, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) is to receive more funding.   This will be given so it can monitor the implications of the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (Drip) law. According to BBC news, the monitoring will require communications companies to store customer data for 12 months and Information Commissioner Christopher Graham would receive money to cover "extra duties imposed on him by...

An online travel firm has been fined £150,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) after 1,163,996 credit and debit card records were stolen in an attack.   According to The Register, Think W3 Limited was hacked in December 2012 in an attack that relied on what the ICO described as "insecure" coding on the website of its subsidiary business, Essential Travel Ltd.   The Information Commissioner's Office was keen to stress there is no link...

A new form of ransomware that uses anonymous network connections and bitcoin demands has been detected.   Research by Kaspersky, the “Onion” ransomware uses The Onion Router (TOR) connections to make it harder to trace criminal activity and seize malicious control servers. The company claimed that the malware is being sold on underground forums and attracted international attention, and Kaspersky said that it expects further infections in other regions, especially in the US, UK and...

A series flaw in Internet Explorer was held for at least three years before it was revealed at the hacking contest Pwn2Own earlier this year.   According to The Hacker News, French vulnerability management company Vupen said that the zero-day vulnerability affected versions 8, 9, 10 and 11 of Internet Explorer browser that allowed attackers to remotely bypass the IE Protected Mode sandbox.   It claimed that the flaw was discovered by the company on...

The head of Australia’s computer emergency response team (AusCERT) has left the organisation after 12 years of service.   According to  IT news, Graham Ingram joined the CERT which was then established within the University of Queensland's IT Services division in 1993. It was later established as a not-for-profit information security body in 2002. As a result of his departure, the position has now been disbanded.   Thomas King, the university's associate director of Information...

Despite a disruption of the Cryptolocker ransomware operation, the Benjamin F. Edwards & Co. brokerage house recently suffered an attack by the CryptoWall.   According to Tweaktown, the incident took place in late May, with the unauthorised third party compromising their computer systems.   Stu Sjouwerman, CEO of KnowBe4, said that the ransomware sends unidentified data out of the victim's network, meaning that the malware infection needs to be treated as a data breach with...

A rumoured backdoor in iOS has led to Apple denying it is working with the NSA.   According to Intego, a data forensics expert and jailbreaker has discovered what he claims to be a undocumented “backdoor” in the iOS operating system used on iPhones and iPads that could be exploited by the NSA and other law enforcement agencies.   Jonathan Zdziarski (also known as “NerveGas”) presented his findings this month at the annual Hackers on...

Mozilla has expanded its Safe Browsing service for Firefox to monitor malicious downloads as well as malicious websites.   According to a Mozilla blog, the latest version of Firefox (as of July 22nd ) will protect users by comparing files users download against these lists of malicious files, and blocking them from infecting your system. A future version of Firefox (released in September) will further verify the signature when a user downloads an application file....