Top 10 Stories

Softpedia: Malicious cyber-incidents started to record an upward trend, with activity concentrating in Baghdad, Erbil, Basra, and Mosul. Attackers rely on dynamic DNS services to communicate with the infected machines. Based on the recent geo-political conflicts in the area, the company speculates that these computers could have been used in cyber-espionage campaigns and targeted multi-stage attacks.

Arstechnica: Websites that run WordPress and MailPoet, a plugin with more than 1.7 million downloads, are susceptible to hacks that give attackers almost complete control, researchers have warned. "If you have this plugin activated on your website, the odds are not in your favor," Daniel Cid, CTO of security firm Sucuri, warned in a blog post published Tuesday. "An attacker can exploit this vulnerability without having any privileges/accounts on the target site. This is a major threat,...

Arstechnica: Last December, Microsoft promised to expand its use of encryption for its cloud services to protect them from criminals and hackers (and, though the company didn't say so, spying governments). Today, it announced that it has reached a number of milestones in this ongoing effort. Both inbound and outbound mail on the Outlook.com service will use TLS encryption when sending and receiving from servers that also support TLS. The company says that it has...

PC World: The FBI and CIA can also query the content of U.S. residents’ electronic communications that the National Security Agency inadvertently collects when targeting foreign terrorism suspects, an intelligence official said. While privacy advocates have objected to a so-called “backdoor search loophole” allowing the NSA access to electronic communications by U.S. residents, it was unclear until now whether other agencies also had access to those emails, phone calls and other communications.

Tweaktown: Western energy companies are under attack by cybercriminals located in Eastern Europe, compromising industrial control system software updates. The attackers, known as "Dragonfly," are able to spy on energy sector targets, and could have damaged or disrupted energy service to customers, according to security firm Symantec. In addition, Dragonfly utilizes a large library of malware and other cyberattack tools capable of causing damage to targets. Along with infecting industrial control systems, the group is...

The Register: The OpenSSL project, having suffered sharp criticism following the revelation of a string of serious security vulnerabilities, has published a roadmap explaining how it plans to address users' concerns. "The OpenSSL project is increasingly perceived as slow-moving and insular," the intro to the document states. "This roadmap will attempt to address this by setting out some objectives for improvement, along with defined timescales."

PC World: Microsoft’s seizure of domains from a DNS service provider has also disrupted some state-sponsored cyberespionage campaigns, according to security vendor Kaspersky Lab. A quarter of the long-term malware operations run by hacking groups tracked by the Russian security vendor have been affected by the seizure of domains from No-IP, wroteanalyst Costin Rau on a company blog Tuesday.

V3: A new sophisticated HijackRAT malware capable of simultaneously hacking private data, stealing banking credentials and granting hackers remote access to the infected device has been uncovered by security researchers at FireEye. FireEye said the malware comes loaded in a malicious app called Google Service Framework and is one of the most advanced malware apps ever uncovered. "In the past, we've seen Android malware that executes privacy leakage, banking credential theft, or remote access separately, but this sample...

The Register: Intelligence agencies are among the most prolific buyers of zero-day computer security flaws that can be used to spy on enemies foreign and domestic, or so it's claimed – and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has launched a lawsuit to find out what exactly they are doing with them. "Since these vulnerabilities potentially affect the security of users all over the world, the public has a strong interest in knowing how these agencies...

Arstechnica: Researchers have uncovered a malware campaign that gave attackers the ability to sabotage the operations of energy grid owners, electricity generation firms, petroleum pipelines, and industrial equipment providers. Called Dragonfly, the hacking group managed to install one of two remote access trojans (RATs) on computers belonging to energy companies located in the US and at least six European countries, according to a research report published Monday by Symantec.