Top 10 Stories

BBC - Last month a Chinese official in charge of internet surveillance gave notice that mobs of web users who turn on individuals and make their lives a misery will not be tolerated. In China it happens often and on a massive scale, earning the phenomenon the title of the "human flesh search engine". On Thursday 21 March 2013, the world changed for Yin Feng, a self-described "average guy" who worked as a part-time taxi driver...

Register - Two ISPs in The Netherlands have overturned a court order that forced them to block access to BitTorrent search engine the Pirate Bay. Internet providers in the Euro nation were told by a district judge in 2012 to seal off the website from their customers, at the request of anti-piracy campaigners.  

Infosecurity - CISOs and CSOs are now acting as not only technology leaders, but business leaders as well, protecting networks and computer systems along with the long-term business interests that rely on those systems. New tactics in hacktivism, cyber-espionage and APTs have contributed to a rapidly evolving cyber-landscape that has pushed approaches to threat intelligence into new realms, with more holistic strategies.  

Panda Security - Have you received an email with the subject “Mostra tudo Video intimo de Neymar e Bruna Marquezinel!!”? Well, if you have, be careful! PandaLabs has detected a malicious attack that uses the name of the FC Barcelona star as bait to install malware on users’ computers. Neymar has been making headlines during the last few weeks. His controversial transfer to FC Barcelona, which has ultimately led to the resignation of the club’s president, and his alleged split from his girlfriend have...

The Conversation - Given the heightened sense of concern about our personal data following the Edward Snowden revelations, it probably isn’t the best time for the NHS to ask us for more. So it simply hasn’t bothered asking. The information contained in your health records has the potential to help researchers gain insight into disease and to allow authorities to make better decisions about healthcare provision so it’s easy to see why the NHS wants to...

Lifehacker - Time and again we've been reminded that we, as a society, pretty much suck at choosing passwords. It doesn't help that companies allow weak passwords to be created and have poor policies. Dashlane reports on how the top 100 online sites fare when it comes to ensuring secure passwords.   The ranking is based on which sites require: password length of at least 8 characters; a mix of letters, numbers, and symbols; blocked account access...

Arstechnica - Researchers have uncovered a piece of botnet malware that is capable of infecting computers running Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux that have Oracle's Java software framework installed. The cross-platform HEUR:Backdoor.Java.Agent.a, as reported in a blog post published Tuesday by Kaspersky Lab, takes hold of computers by exploiting CVE-2013-2465, a critical Java vulnerability that Oracle patched in June. The security bug is present on Java 7 u21 and earlier. Once the bot has infected a computer,...

Krebs on Security - Federal authorities in Atlanta today are expected to announce the arrest and charging of a 24-year-old Russian man who allegedly created and maintained the SpyEye Trojan, a sophisticated botnet creation kit that has been implicated in a number of costly online banking thefts against businesses and consumers. 24-year-old Aleksander Panin is thought to be responsible for SpyEye. According to sources, the U.S. Justice Department is charging Aleksander Panin of Tver, Russia with being part of a gang...

IT News - Unidentified hackers temporarily blocked access to the US federal court system's public website on Friday US time, preventing lawyers from filing legal documents, Politico reported. The denial-of-service attack hit uscourts.gov, as well as other federal court websites around the country, a spokesman for the Administrative Office of the US Courts told Politico. PACER, the court system access page that provides information on cases, and its electronic filing system also were affected.

IT News - The US National Security Agency is involved in industrial espionage and will grab any intelligence it can get its hands on regardless of its value to national security, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden told a German TV network. In text released ahead of a lengthy interview to be broadcast on Sunday, ARD TV quoted Snowden saying the NSA does not limit its espionage to issues of national security and he cited German...