Top 10 Stories

Arstechnica: The nation's top Internet service providers sent more than 1.3 million infringement notices to alleged copyright scofflaws last year, according to a study released Wednesday. The system works by matching IP addresses to account holders, and the notices were sent by just five ISPs participating in the so-called "copyright alert system" (CAS) that commenced in February 2013, a US program strongly backed by the Obama administration and run by the newly created Center for Copyright...

Threatpost: With bug bounties being all the rage, the platforms that support them are emerging as important pieces of the security research, disclosure and reward ecosystem. One of those platforms, HackerOne, has scored a major coup in hiring Katie Moussouris, the driving force behind Microsoft’s bounty program, to oversee its policy and disclosure philosophy and work with customers on the intricacies of vulnerability disclosure. HackerOne is perhaps best known as the platform that supports the Internet...

Financial Times: Healthcare companies have been more vulnerable to cyber attacks in the last year than even the retail industry, which suffered high-profile data breaches at Target and Ebay this year, according to a new report by a cyber security ratings company.  

The Hacker News: It has been months ago since the release of Samsung’s latest Smartphone, Galaxy S5 and we have seen a portion of International units receive root, but a couple of the carrier variants including the developer edition of Samsung Galaxy S5 for Verizon and At&T hasn’t been in the list, sadly. The Interesting part is that till now no hacker has found a way out to gain the root-rights of the Verizon as...

Channel 4: Mr Snowden, on the run from US authorities for leaking details of National Security Agency "spying" programmes, in an advance excerpt of his interview with America's NBC, rejected claims by critics that he was a "low level analyst" at the NSA. "Well, it's no secret that the US tends to get more and better intelligence out of computers nowadays than they do out of people," Mr Snowden told NBC news anchor Brian Williams.

PC World: eBay’s security team isn’t going to get a break for a while. Following an attack disclosed last week that exposed sensitive information of up to 145 million people, the auction giant is scrambling to repair several other problems reported in its vast network by security enthusiasts. “As a company, we take all vulnerabilities reported to us very seriously, evaluating any reported issue within the context of our entire security infrastructure,” wrote Ryan Moore,...

The Guardian: Microsoft has warned against using a hack that allows Windows XP to continue to receive important security updates after Microsoft withdrew support in April. The hack tricks Microsoft’s update servers into applying security patches to Microsoft’s 13-year-old Windows XP. A small change within Windows XP makes it appear as other versions of Windows that are still supported until 2019.  

Arstechnica: A large number of people, mostly located in Australia, are reporting they have come under an unexplained attack that holds their iPhones and iPads hostage and demands they pay a $100 ransom. The attack appears to work by compromising iCloud accounts associated with the disabled devices, according to an Apple support forum discussion that started Sunday morning and quickly accumulated several hundred posts. Commandeered devices typically emit a loud tone that's associated with a feature that...

Krebs on Security: Late last month, hackers allied with the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) compromised the Web site for the RSA Conference, the world’s largest computer security gathering. The attack, while unremarkable in many ways, illustrates the continued success of phishing attacks that spoof top executives within targeted organizations. It’s also a textbook example of how third-party content providers can be leveraged to break into high-profile Web sites.  

Tom’s Guide: Bitcoin efficiently requires a powerful computer, and few home computers are more powerful than gaming rigs. Enterprising hackers may have corrupted a pirated version of Ubisoft's anticipated game "Watch Dogs" with insidious Bitcoin mining software. According to the PC gaming site Gamecrastinate, a significant number of users downloading unauthorized "Watch Dogs" torrents reported a mysterious process called "winlogin.exe" (not the legitimate winlogon.exe) eating up to 25 percent of their CPUs' processing cycles. A little...