Top 10 Stories

Spider Labs: Internet Explorer Zero Day: CVE-2014-0322 Recently, several security vendors reported about a new IE 0day which affects version 9 and 10.  The attackers targeted the U.S. Veterans of Foreign Wars website (vfw.org) with an injected iframe which contained a previously unknown exploit for IE.

Chicago Tribune: Chicago-based law firm responds to report of NSA spying Mayer Brown, the Chicago-based law firm cited in a weekend report about National Security Administration spying, has issued a statement that stops short of an outright denial that its communications were under surveillance but says there is “no indication” that any spying occurred “at the firm.” Citing a February 2013 document obtained by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, theNew York Times on Sunday reported that...

Softpedia: Phishing Scam: Regions Bank Alert – Contact Details Changed Cybercriminals are sending out phishing emails designed to target the customers of Regions. The fake notifications carry the subject line “Regions Bank Alert: Contact Details Changed,” and they purport to come from [email protected]. The sample submitted to millersmiles.co.uk reads something like this: “This email has been sent as a notification that we have initiated a new security procedures to our internet banking for safety online banking purposes. Your Online...

Softpedia: XSS Vulnerability Found in WikiLeaks’ Internal Search Engine Earlier this week, WikiLeaks added an internal search engine to its website to allow users to find documents based on certain keywords. Almost immediately, security researchers noticed that the input wasn’t properly sanitized. Security expert Mazin Ahmed has published a video on YouTube to demonstrate the existence of the cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability. He reported it to WikiLeaks, which addressed the flaw within hours.

BBC: Facebook to buy messaging app WhatsApp for $19bn Facebook has bought messaging app WhatsApp in a deal worth a total of $19bn (£11.4bn) in cash and shares. It is the social networking giant's biggest acquisition to date. WhatsApp has more than 450 million monthly users and is popular with people looking to avoid text messaging charges. In a statement announcing the deal, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg described WhatsApp's services as "incredibly valuable".

Computer Weekly: Removing Microsoft admin rights from employees mitigates 92% of critical vulnerabilities and 60% of all vulnerabilities reported by the software firm in the past year, a study has revealed. The study by privilege management firm Avecto analysed data from security bulletins issued by Microsoft throughout 2013.

Naked Security: After many public password disclosures, there's often a good-humoured race amongst security professionals to see who can crack the most passwords the fastest, or who can find the most obscure and amusing passwords from the database. But, as we explained in yesterday's article, Forbes was using PHPass Portable hashes, which means that there is a loop of 8193 MD5 hash calculations for each password check

Infosecurity: AT&T has released its very first transparency report, detailing the government-led requests for information on its subscribers. The telco said that it in the first six months of 2013, it received between 2,000 and 2,999 National Security Letters, affecting between 4,000 and 4,999 customer accounts. NSLs, subpoenas issued by the FBI in regard to counterterrorism or counterintelligence, are limited to basic information, such as a list of phone numbers dialed or subscriber information – not...

Fox News: An Iranian hack of the Navy’s largest unclassified computer network reportedly took more than four months to resolve, raising concern among some lawmakers about security gaps exposed by the attack. The Wall Street Journal, citing current and former U.S. officials, reported late Monday that the cyberattack targeted the Navy Marine Corps Internet, which is used by the Navy Department to host websites, store nonsensitive information, and handle voice, video, and data communications.

The Register: Consultancy outfit Deloitte reckons early big data projects have had to be written down because they failed, thanks in part to a “buy it and the benefits will come” mentality. The source of failure was sometimes difficulty making open source software work and/or integrate with other systems, Deloitte Australia's technology consulting partner Tim Nugent told The Reg. Such failures weren't because the software was of poor quality. Instead, organisations weren't able to make it do...