Top 10 Stories

We Live Security: A small American law firm has admitted that every document on a server at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg company has fallen prey to the Cryptolocker ransomware, according to a report by local station WSO CTV. The infection arrived via a phishing email, according to Paul Goodson, who heads the firm in North Carolina state capital Charlotte.  

PC World: Microsoft is impoloring its technically astute customers to help friends and family who are still running Windows XP get rid of the soon-to-be-retired operating system. The Redmond, Washington company’s appeal was akin to General Motors asking customers to help the Detroit automaker sell new 2014 Cadillac Escalades, or General Mills asking consumers to convince friends to switch from their monochrome Cheerios breakfast cereal to something more colorful, like Trix or Lucky Charms.  

ZDNet: In an unwelcome surprise for Comcast, hacking groupNullCrew FTS announced on Twitter today that it has successfully hacked Comcast, providing a link on Pastebin to unredacted information as evidence. The hackers claim to have gained access to, and published, what appears to be the Zimbra LDAP and MySQL passwords through a Local File Inclusion vulnerability.  

The Register: North Korea has agreed to allow internet access within its borders, or at least within the bounds of an industrial park run jointly with firms from the South. Pyongyang officials have agreed to open a business centre in the Kaesong Industrial Complex in the first half of the year, which will initially house 20 internet-connected PCs.  

Europol: Just over a year ago, on 11 January 2013, the European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) at Europol opened its doors for business. Created to strengthen the European Union’s law enforcement community response to cybercrime, EC3's brief was to help protect European citizens and businesses against existing and future cyber threats.   The creation of a European Cybercrime Centre was a priority in the EU Security Strategy and strongly backed by European ministers. The decision to...

Reuters: A computer security software firm has uncovered what it calls the first cyber espionage campaign believed to be started by a Spanish-speaking country, targeting government agencies, energy companies and activists in 31 countries. Dubbed "The Mask," the campaign had operated undetected since 2007 and infected more than 380 targets before it stopped last week, Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab said on Monday.  

IT Pro Portal: India has launched an investigation after a media report alleged that Chinese telecoms company Huawei hacked into the state-run telecoms carrier Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL), according to a senior government official.   "An incident about the alleged hacking of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) network by M/S Huawei ... has come to notice," said junior minister for communications and information technology Killi Kruparani in a written reply to a question from a...

  The Verge:A military-style attack on a electrical substation in California last April nearly shut down power in the state, and raised serious questions about the security of US infrastructure.   Now a group of lawmakers are asking industry groups whether the US power grid needs its security improved to keep something like that from happening again.  

Trend Micro: Recently, I was asked by NBC to participate in an experiment to deploy honeypots in Moscow, Russia, to see how fast they would be compromised.   First, all the attacks required some kind of user interaction. Second, these attacks could happen anywhere. Third, the infections occurred on newly unboxed hardware.  

Softpedia: Hackers have breached and defaced the official website of Nepal’s Office of the President (presidentofnepal.gov.np). First, an Iranian hacker who uses the online moniker Dr.3v1l uploaded a defacement page to presidentofnepal.gov.np/banner. He has also leaked some information stolen from the site’s database, including administrator usernames and passwords.