Top 10 Stories

  Computer World: Financial services firms plan to increase spending on cyber defences this year, as more businesses become aware of the risks to the sector. Almost two-fifths of finance companies (38 percent) claimed that they would increase the amount spent on cyber security to meet the growing threat, according to a CBI/PwC survey. Meanwhile, of the 87 UK banks, building societies, insurers and other finance sector companies surveyed, only four percent planned to lower...

  Ottawa Citizen: Security experts believe the data breach announced by the Canada Revenue Agency on Monday could be far worse than officials are letting on. The government department revealed Monday that 900 social insurance numbers were taken from its servers during a six-hour-window after the HeartBleed exploit was publicly announced a week ago.  

The Register: Lavaboom, a new German-based and supposeldyNSA-proof email service, will go into private beta this week with a mission spread the gospel according to Edward Snowden by making encrypted email accessible to all. Although it has been referred to in various parts of the interwebs as an heir to Lavabit, the now-defunct encrypted email service used by Snowden, the new service's name is a tribute to its predecessor and nothing more.  

Telegraph: Until 1983, the existence of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) as an intelligence agency was not officially acknowledged, let alone its director publicly named. Nowadays, the huge doughnut-shaped listening base in Cheltenham is one of the country’s most identifiable buildings. The surveillance organisation even has its own website and recruits via the internet. But if GCHQ is no longer a state secret it still remains highly secretive, perhaps too closed-up for a world of...

BBC: A council breached the Data Protection Act after sensitive records relating to the care of a young child were lost, an investigation has ruled.   Social services documents requested by a family member from Wokingham Borough Council went missing after the delivery driver left them outside the requester's home in August 2013. They included details of allegations of neglect and abuse carried out by the requester's ex-partner.  

Business Week: The Pentagon plans to triple its cybersecurity staff by 2016, U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced recently. A few days later, FBI Supervisory Special Agent Charles Gilgen said at a conference on cybercrime that his agency’s cyber division plans to hire 1,000 agents and 1,000 analysts in the coming year.  

IT Security Guru: Tools being used to detect the OpenSSL vulnerability often contain bugs too. According to research by CNS Security, methods for detecting whether your systems are affected have bugs themselves which is leading to false negative results. Adrian Hayter, blogger and penetration tester at CNS Security, said: “I was called upon to perform checks against numerous systems during the week, and I noticed that some of the scripts would find a vulnerability whilst others would...

Arstechnica: The heavily marketed fingerprint sensor in Samsung's new Galaxy 5 smartphone has been defeated by whitehat hackers who were able to gain unfettered access to a PayPal account linked to the handset. The hack, by researchers at Germany's Security Research Labs, is the latest to show the drawbacks of using fingerprints, iris scans, and other physical characteristics to authenticate an owner's identity to a computing device. While advocates promote biometrics as a safer and easier alternative to...

BBC: Campaigners have raised privacy concerns over a facial recognition database being developed by the FBI that could contain 52m images by 2015. The civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) obtained information about the project through a freedom of information request.  

Krebs on Security: Computer hard drive maker LaCie has acknowledged that a hacker break-in at its online store exposed credit card numbers and contact information on customers for the better part of the past year. The disclosure comes almost a month after the breach was first disclosed by KrebsOnSecurity. On Mar. 17, 2014, this blog published evidence showing that the Web storefront for French hardware giant LaCie (now owned by Seagate) had been compromised by a group of hackers that...