Top 10 Stories

  Techcrunch: Condoleezza Rice, former United States Secretary of State and National Security Advisor has joined the board of cloud file storage and syncing firm Dropbox. Dropbox is in the news today after launching a number of new products and features at a morning event in San Francisco. The company debuted Carousel, a photo storage and sharing service, along with the release of its Dropbox for Business offering to the general public, and an Android client for its Mailbox email...

Arstechnica: A whitehat hacker from the Baltimore suburbs went too far in his effort to drive home a point about a security vulnerability he reported to a client. Now he’s unemployed and telling all on reddit. David Helkowski was working for Canton Group, a Baltimore-based software consulting firm on a project for the University of Maryland (UMD), when he claims he found malware on the university’s servers that could be used to gain access to personal...

  PC World: Cyber criminals have been developing increasingly sophisticated malware that make use of Windows PowerShell scripts in an attempt to fly under the radar. The Windows PowerShell is a command-line shell and scripting environment designed for automating system and application administration tasks. It is installed by default in Windows 7 and above, but old versions are also available for Windows XP as a separate package.  

  USA Today: The Army's academy has established a cyber warfare research institute to groom elite cyber troops and solve thorny problems for the Army and the nation in this new war-fighting domain. The U.S. Army Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., plans to build a cyber brain trust unprecedented within the service academies, filling 75 positions over the next three years — including scholars in technology, psychology, history and law, among other fields.  

The Register: Cybercrooks are upping the ante by loading malware as an attachment inside another attachment in a bid to slip past security defences. A new variant of the Upatre Trojan comes bundled in spammed messages that imitate emails from known banks such as Lloyds Bank and Wells Fargo. The .MSG file of the malicious emails contains another .MSG file attached with an attached "ZIP" file.  

Washington Post: The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents. Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by statute and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that...

Graham Cluley: If you need further evidence that Google has a slip-shod approach to policing the official Android app store, then take a look at this. As Android Police reports, a new Android app called “Virus Shield” and costing $3.99 has become a big hit, managing to reach the highly-prized position of #1 new paid app in the Google Play store, after little more than a week.  

  RT: WikiLeaks has published what the anti-secrecy organization says is the penultimate draft agreement expected to be discussed later this month in Brazil at a global internet governance meeting co-hosted by 12 countries including the United States. The 11-page document published on Tuesday by the secret-spilling website is based on the recommendations submitted by more than 180 international contributors who cared to weigh in with their take on how they think the internet and...

TechDirt: Ed Snowden testified (via video, of course) for the Council of Europe, the "top human rights body" of Europe, and told them that the NSA spied on various human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. He told council members: "The NSA has specifically targeted either leaders or staff members in a number of civil and non-governmental organisations … including domestically within the borders of the United States." Snowden did not reveal which...

  Gulf Business: The number of targeted cyber-attack campaigns increased by 91 per cent in 2013, with each attack lasing three times longer than in 2012, according to an industry report. Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report 2014, found that the mining, which includes oil and gas, and manufacturing industries were most at risk of being attacked, while the most targeted attacks last year were against governments and the services industry.