Top 10 Stories

The Register: Monsanto has admitted credit card data along with names, addresses and US taxation information for 1300 customers and employees was compromised in after hackers broke into its servers. The March breach affected Monsanto's Precision Planting division which manufactured specialist farming equipment. It came as the agriculture giant pushed to sell big data intelligence services harvested from and disseminated to its customers.

Independent: International ‘Hacktivist’ group Anonymous have announced they are preparing a full scale cyber-attack on the World Cup’s corporate sponsors during the tournament that starts in two weeks. In an interview with news agency Reuters, one masked member of the group who called himself Che Commodore, said that preparations for a wide-scale campaign had already begun.

PC World: Here’s another reason to think twice before you post photos of yourself on the Internet: The New York Times reported Sunday that the National Security Agency collects millions of photos each day from electronic communication and analyzes them as part of a major facial recognition effort. According to the leaked documents obtained by the Times, of the millions of images it collects daily, the NSA harvests about 55,000 that it considers to be “facial...

The Guardian: The Steam gaming platform is having to cope with frequent and varied attacks, with reams of user data posted online by malicious hackers, security experts have warned. Online cyber criminal forums are littered with Steam credentials harvested by botnets - networks of infected PCs controlled by hackers - selling for small sums. A post seen by The Guardian from one dark web dealer on a Russian forum offered a full log of Steam-related...

Net Security: Malware creation has broken all records during this period, with a figure of more than 15 million new samples, and more than 160,000 new samples appearing every day, according to Panda Security. Trojans are still the most abundant type of new malware, accounting for 71.85% of new samples created during Q1. Similarly, infections by Trojans were once again the most common type of infection over this period, representing 79.90% of all cases.

Tom’s Guide: No matter how strong your passwords may be or how carefully you monitor your online accounts, a large-scale data breach can expose your personal information and leave you right back at square one. A recent study suggests some troubling statistics: an estimated 47 percent of all American adults have been affected by data breaches over the last year. The information comes from the Ponemon Institute, a research firm that studies privacy and data...

Reuters: Some of the largest U.S. companies are looking to hire cybersecurity experts in newly elevated positions and bring technologists on to their boards, a sign that corporate America is increasingly worried about hacking threats. JPMorgan Chase & Co, PepsiCo Inc, Cardinal Health Inc, Deere & Co and The United Services Automobile Association (USAA) are among the Fortune 500 companies seeking chief information security officers (CISOs) and other security personnel to shore up their cyber defenses, according to people...

Arstechnica: During his recent interview with NBC’s Brian Williams, whistleblower Edward Snowden said that he did go through official channels to air his grievances within the National Security Agency, contrary to what the spy agency has declared previously. As recently as December 2013, NSA spokeswomanVanee Vines gave a prepared statement to The Washington Post saying that “after extensive investigation, including interviews with his former NSA supervisors and co-workers, we have not found any evidence to support Mr. Snowden’s...

Arstechnica: A Linux Foundation project inspired by the Heartbleed security flaw announced that it will fund a security audit for the OpenSSL code base and the salaries of two full-time developers. The Heartbleed flaw shone a spotlight on how poorly funded the OpenSSL cryptographic software library is despite being used by many of the world's richest technology companies. The Linux Foundation, with support from those tech companies, created the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) to boost...

The Register: Google wants to bring new blood into the security bug hunter community with a game launched to test developers' knowledge of cross site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities. The XSS Game put devs through six games of increasing complexity that required successful attacks against mock vulnerable web applications. "The game is designed primarily for developers working on web applications who do not specialise in security," Google wrote on the game page.