Top 10 Stories

There's a sign at Google asking employees to check their corporate networks and Windows PCs at the door. It reflects the position of the world's biggest search engine that perimeter defence and its respective gadgetry is a dead duck. It also points to a decision by Google to ditch the popular operating system as a result of the 2009 state-sponsored Operation Aurora attacks. Google staff now can use Windows PCs only with a business case...

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently announced a new project to use video games to help test computer software for security vulnerabilities. The military and government use a lot of Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) applications, and they need to go through a formal verification process to make sure they are free of security issues. DARPA’s Crowd Sourced Formal Verification (CSFV) has created several games to try to make the process fast, easy and fun.

The National Security Agency is secretly piggybacking on the tools that enable Internet advertisers to track consumers, using "cookies" and location data to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance. The agency's internal presentation slides, provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, show that when companies follow consumers on the Internet to better serve them advertising, the technique opens the door for similar tracking by the government. The slides also suggest that the agency...

Attacks may be down, but 62% of the malicious infrastructure, along with the P2P communications channel, is alive and well. The ZeroAccess botnet remains alive, despite Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit (MDCU) last week joining forces with the FBI and Europol to scuttle the botnet. While the group successfully deactivated some of the infrastructure used to power the botnet, it failed to compromise all of the botnet's click-fraud layer and also left the ZeroAccess peer-to-peer (P2P)...

U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty says its news services have been disrupted by a cyber attack for the second time in two months. The Prague-based broadcaster says the latest intermittent cyber warfare began Sunday. It says the attackers have been flooding computer servers with fake traffic from many computers infected with malware. The company experienced a similar attack in November and a more limited one in 2008.  

Two programmers have separately concluded that the algorithm Reddit uses to sort its posts is flawed in a way that discriminates against new posts that briefly trigger a negative reaction from Reddit readers.   That seems trivial at first, especially if you don't understand code. Reddit appears to be working just fine — so who cares about a typo among thousands of lines of code?  

Everyone who carries a cellphone generates a trail of electronic breadcrumbs that records everywhere they go. Those breadcrumbs reveal a wealth of information about who we are, where we live, who our friends are and much more. And as we reported last week, the National Security Agency is collecting location information in bulk — 5 billion records per day worldwide — and using sophisticated algorithms to assist with U.S. intelligence-gathering operations. How do they do it?...

In the Netherlands, it seems that there has been a move by the Dutch Bankers Association (NVB) to provide some clarity and consistency for Dutch consumers. Prompted by a rash of phishing scams that tripled fraud losses in just one year, the NVB have responded with a code of conduct based on five security guidelines. Alleged victims of internet fraud will have to prove they followed these in order to have losses refunded. The code...

The FBI custom-designs malware to snare suspects, a court has heard, and has been able “for years” to watch suspects through PC webcams – without turning on the light to warn the victim the camera is active, a court has heard. The Washington Post reported that the decision to use such malware was taken on a case-by-case basis – and the software was “custom built” to catch individuals. The information was revealed by a search warrant requested...

Yet another scam is spreading on Facebook, this time using the tried-and-trusted technique of luring unsuspecting social networkers into clicking by pretending to be supermarket vouchers in the run-up to Christmas. Many users are currently seeing messages being posted by their friends.