Top 10 Stories

Criminals have compromised tens of thousands of Facebook accounts in the past few days using malware that masquerades as a paint program for relieving stress.  "Relieve Stress Paint" is available through a domain that uses Unicode representation to show up as aol.net on search engines and in emails, researchers from security firm Radware said in a post published Wednesday morning. (This query showed the trojan was also available on a domain that was designed to appear...

Exclusive: Profile data was scraped without user consent or knowledge to "build a three-dimensional picture" on millions of people. A little-known data firm was able to build 48 million personal profiles, combining data from sites and social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Zillow, among others -- without the users' knowledge or consent. Localblox, a Bellevue, Wash.-based firm, says it "automatically crawls, discovers, extracts, indexes, maps and augments data in a variety of formats from the...

TaskRabbit, the handyman-for-hire app, is back online after being intentionally taken down on Monday following an apparent data breach. “While our investigation is ongoing, preliminary evidence shows that an unauthorized user gained access to our systems,” the company said. “As a result, certain personally identifiable information may have been compromised.” View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE:

Facebook Inc’s Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg came under pressure from EU lawmakers on Wednesday to come to Europe and shed light on the data breach involving Cambridge Analytica that affected nearly three million Europeans. The world’s largest social network is under fire worldwide after information about nearly 87 million users wrongly ended up in the hands of the British political consultancy, a firm hired by Donald Trump for his 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign. European...

Ottawa has unveiled the final regulations for Canadian organizations who discover data breaches, offering a checklist of steps for those affected, but stopping short of enforcing strict timelines coming into effect next month in Europe. The federal government has been mulling data-breach regulations for three years, and has rolled out drafts and incremental final details for months. Slated to come into effect Nov. 1., the regulations announced Wednesday outline the minimum reporting requirements for organizations...

Hong Kong Broadband Network, the city’s second largest fixed-line residential broadband provider, discovered on Monday that an inactive customer database had been accessed without authorisation. The personal data of some 380,000 Hong Kong Broadband Network customers, including details for more than 40,000 credit cards, were compromised in a cyberattack against the telecommunications company’s database. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: SCMP

An NHS website hosting data from patient surveys that was defaced by hackers has been fixed. The site, insights.london.nhs.uk, was given a black background, eerie music and a message in white text that read: "Hacked by AnoaGhost." Cyber-security expert Kevin Beaumont spotted the defacement and tweeted a screenshot of it to his followers on Tuesday afternoon. A few hours later, the message was removed. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: BBC

Minecraft, the immensely popular world-building game with more than 74 million players, has a malware problem. Users who download skins for their avatars, from the official Minecraft website, are unwittingly allowing malicious code onto their computers. Currently, nearly 50,000 Minecraft accounts are known to be infected with the malware which is designed to reformat a person’s hard drive and delete backup data and system programs. View Full Story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Alphr

Dozens of major technology companies including Microsoft, Facebook, Cisco, and SAP have signed onto a pledge to protect their users around the globe against cybersecurity threats and to abstain from helping any government launch a cyber attack. View Full Story ORIGINAL SOURCE: ZDNet

The NHS has shown an “alarming” failure to tackle cyber security despite growing concerns about threats to the UK, MPs have warned. View Full Story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Telegraph