Hackers using bot armies for financial gain
A new security report by digital identity company ThreatMetrix says hackers are using a large army made out of "automated cyber robots", or bots, for financial gain.
Their Q1 2016 report, entitled Q1 Cybercrime Report, says there have been 311 million bot attacks detected and stopped in this year’s first quarter.
Medical devices targeted by cyber attacks
Hacking and cyber attacks are no longer confined to computers. Thanks to the Internet of Things they affect a whole lot of other equipment too and that includes medical devices.
Application protection specialist Arxan has produced an infographic looking at the growing threat landscape surrounding connected medical devices.
Popular hacking site Nulled hit by cyberattackers, user info leaked
The email addresses and private messages of over 470,000 members of the popular hacking website Nulled have been leaked following a data breach.
The website served as a marketplace where its users could buy and sell the account details they stole from users along with hacking advice and tips. The data that was leaked from Nulled contained over 5,000 purchase records that detailed how the stolen information available on the site’s marketplace was exchanged between users.
Four-year-old LinkedIn IDs go up for sale online
Cast your mind back to 2012 and the LinkedIn hack that had the grown up's social network scurrying to advise its users to change their passwords.
It was thought at the time that the 6.5 million sets of credentials posted on a Russian password forum was the extent of the breach. However, four years on a hacker under the name of 'Peace' is offering for sale a database of millions more LinkedIn accounts.
Hacker makes millions, still lives with his mother
Hacking into newswire services can land you a 20-year prison sentence, in case you didn’t know. And this is exactly what 28-year-old Ukrainian hacker Vadym Iermolovych is facing.
The hacker pleaded guilty in a federal court in Newark, New Jersey, on Monday, on the case of making $30 million by trading non-public information about corporate earnings.
IT pros too confident about detecting ongoing cyber-attacks
Endpoint detection and response company Tripwire and Dimensional Research conducted a research, and asked 763 IT professionals from various industries about their security practices, and if they felt confident they could detect an ongoing cyber-attack.
The two companies announced that the majority of IT experts felt overconfident in their abilities to detect an ongoing threat and remove an unauthorized device from their network.
Businesses open to hiring ex-hackers to beef up security
The Hollywood scenario where people hire ex criminals to do their bidding, as no one else seems to have the necessary skills, has been replicated in real life, according to a new report by cyber-security service provider SecureData.
SecureData says more than a third of businesses (34 percent) would have no problems hiring an ex hacker to compensate for the lack of in-house cyber-security skills. I just wonder how you classify someone as an "ex hacker".
Anonymous teams up with GhostSquad to attack major banks
Anonymous has joined forces with GhostSquad to launch successful cyberattacks on eight international banks that were forced to shut down their websites.
The hacktivist collective alongside the hacker group GhostSquad have launched a new operation called Op Icarus which aims to punish corrupt banks and individuals in the financial sector.
India has mobile forensic tools to hack into iPhones
The case of the FBI seeking to force Apple to provide backdoor access to the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone focused attention on security and encryption once again. The agency may have been able to gain access to the phone with help from a third party, but the Indian government has gone one better.
Communications Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has revealed that the government has a tool that can be used to gain access to, among other devices, Apple's iPhone. This is not to say that a tool has been created that bypasses encryption, rather that a method for getting past the lockscreen has been developed.
Five ways to take your passwords to the next level
World Password Day is apparently a day for “taking our passwords to the next level”, so here are five traditions the crooks and password crackers really, really don’t want us to start.
In 2007, Dinei Florencio and Cormac Herley at Microsoft Research looked into the password habits of half a million users in their large-scale study of website password habits. They found that the average user needed about 25 distinct passwords but only had about six.
LAPD hacks iPhone 5s, but how?
The iPhone 5c belonging to San Bernadino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook is not the only iPhone that the US authorities have managed to hack this year. According to a report by Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Police Department has "bypassed the security features" of an iPhone 5s.
The iPhone 5s in question was used by April Jace, the wife of The Shield actor Michael Jace, who is facing murder charges, being accused of killing his partner on May 19, 2014. And, according to court documents reviewed by the publication, on March 18 the LAPD claimed to have found a "forensic cellphone expert" who could hack the device, which is believed to hold important evidence in the trial.
Hackers now targeting victims with country and culture-specific malware
Hackers are targeting specific countries with their malware now, new research from security firm Sophos shows.
The security firm analyzed millions of devices worldwide and has come up with the conclusion that it seems to be more lucrative if the malware is specifically designed to target certain cultures or countries.
Hacker creates reality TV with users' webcams
The webcam debuted long ago and has become integrated into many computer systems. People use it for any number of things, and products like Skype utilize this functionality. But the innovation has a darker side. It turns out this little add-on can be hacked, allowing the perpetrator to view the user.
A hacker in Russia took this to a higher level by not only accessing people's cameras, but broadcasting the video online, right on YouTube.
Waze vulnerability allows hackers to track you
Users of Google’s navigation app Waze seem to be at risk of being followed, as a vulnerability in the app could allow hackers to stalk the users of the app in real-time, a group of researchers from the University of California has found.
The researchers reverse-engineered Waze’s server code and discovered that thousands of "ghost drivers" could be created on Waze’s systems, which can monitor the real drivers around them. Hackers could even create virtual traffic jams, an exploit to track Waze users in real-time.
Malware compromises Swift system -- patch available
The Swift (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) system has apparently fallen victim to the same sophisticated hacking scheme that was used to disrupt the Bangladesh central bank last month.
The cyberattack in Bangladesh resulted in a loss of $951 million from the central bank's account at the Federal Reserve in New York and it now seems likely, thanks to new research from BAE systems, that Swift was also compromised during the attack.
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