Top 10 Stories

The Register: Microsoft has announced a “a security and threat information exchange platform for analysts and researchers working in cybersecurity.” Dubbed “Interflow”, Redmond says the new service is “a distributed system where users decide what communities to form, what data feeds to bring to their communities, and with whom to share data feeds.”

Arstechnica: In the latest gaffe to demonstrate the privacy perils of anonymized data, New York City officials have inadvertently revealed the detailed comings and goings of individual taxi drivers over more than 173 million trips. City officials released the data in response to a public records request and specifically obscured the drivers' hack license numbers and medallion numbers. Rather than including those numbers in plaintext, the 20 gigabyte file contained one-way cryptographic hashes using the MD5 algorithm.

We Live Security: Scammers and fraudsters think nothing of scraping the barrel of bad taste, if they believe it will help them earn a few dollars. Take the latest scam spreading on Facebook, for instance, which claims that Formula 1 racing driving star Michael Schumacher has died. In case you’re not aware, almost six months ago the motor racing legend suffered a severe head injury in a skiing accident, which saw him – until very recently – placed...

Softpedia: Over the weekend, customers of British Gas seeking help from the company’s social media team witnessed some strange tweeting, accompanied by links that led to a phishing website. The links were all shortened, so an unsuspecting customer trying to find out what was so funny, interesting and cool that the help team felt the need to share it with the world would not be so quick at detecting that the page launched was actually a phishing...

Threatpost: It’s been more than two months since news broke of the Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL one of the Internet’s most widely deployed cryptographic libraries. In the days and weeks that followed the emergence of the bug, which affected an unknown but arguably vast swath of the Web, vendors were quick to provide patches. However, new research suggests the zeal to fix the widely publicized bug may be waning. Robert Graham, a security researcher and...

Arstechnica: A federal appeals court has reversed an accountant's tax-evasion conviction because the government seized his computer data and held it for more than 2.5 years—a breach of the constitutional right to be free from unreasonable searches. The 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week that the government's tactics against the Connecticut accountant amounted to an "unreasonable seizure." The authorities seized the accountant's records while investigating alleged illegal activity of his clients. But...

Softpedia: Online men’s publication Askmen.com is said to be the victim of a cyber-attack, with malicious code being injected in various areas of the site in order to redirect visitors to malicious pages serving a Java exploit. The portal is dedicated to providing news for men from domainsranging from sports and health to social activity and entertainment. According to their media page, there are more than 14 million readers in U.S. alone, but the portal also has localized...

Arstechnica: Microsoft developers have fortified Internet Explorer with new protections designed to prevent a type of attack commonly used to surreptitiously install malware on end-user computers. The "isolated heap for DOM objects" made its debut with last week's Patch Tuesday. Just as airbags lower the chance of critical injuries in automobile accidents, the new IE protection is designed to significantly lessen the damage attackers can do when exploiting so-called use-after-free flaws in the browser code.

PC World: The Internet-of-Things is a thing. If you haven’t heard about it yet, get ready because we’re in the early stages of an explosion of technology that will connect, monitor, and in some cases share almost every aspect of our lives. Fortinet conducted a survey of consumers to find out what people think about the security and privacy concerns of the Internet-of-Things. The survey, titled “Internet of Things: Connected Home,” was produced in partnership...

Infosecurity : End users are the cybersecurity staff's worst nightmare. When it comes to endpoint protection, the overwhelming majority of information security professionals believe that their existing security solutions are unable to prevent all endpoint infections, and that anti-virus solutions are ineffective against advanced targeted attacks. Overall, end-users are their biggest security concern.