Computer hackers accessed personally identifiable information and financial details belonging to around 1,400 University of Virginia workers as part of an email phishing scam, the University announced. An internal investigation determined that the culprits first accessed the stolen records in early November 2014 and...
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Late last month, toy maker VTech was hit with a debilitating attack that resulted in an incredible amount of customer data winding up in the wrong hands. Given VTech's abysmal security measures, it's hard to consider it being a "victim" in this attack. Rather, its millions of customers are the ones at risk.
This...
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Another day, another high-profile security breach. This time the breach occurred across the pond at British telecom giant TalkTalk. TalkTalk is the United Kingdom’s second largest “quadruple play” service provider (offering phone, TV, broadband Internet and mobile phone service) behind Virgin Media.
Given its...
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As the years pass, our lives continue to become intertwined even more with the Internet. Today, the Internet acts as a backbone to critical infrastructure, and much like the risk of someone exploiting a flaw to break into our home PC, a real risk exists that enemies of the government could break into and cause harm to...
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AVG has long been considered one of the so called good guys in security software. It drew fan support for offering a no cost version of its antivirus software, which traditionally has worked quite well, but its reputation as a champion of the average Joe is now in jeopardy over a revised privacy policy.
As part of...
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Last month, we reported on something rather concerning: vehicles with Internet connectivity can be broken into, and in same cases, controlled. It didn't take long before we found out that the story wasn't fake - a testament to the fact that vehicle makers are not taking security seriously enough.
Would the hackers...
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If we may impart some words of wisdom to our younger readers out there, it's to choose your role models carefully. It's a piece of advice that comes too late for half a dozen teenagers living in the U.K. who were arrested as part of a sting operation targeting users of hacking group Lizard Squad's Lizard Stresser...
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Amid all the praise Windows 10 is receiving around the web, there is one thing that's at the center of most complaints -- automatic updates. Windows 10 Home users generally don't have a choice in the matter, the updates are mandatory and sent out automatically. For some people with limited bandwidth, that policy is...
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To quote the Guinness brothers, rewarding security researchers with frequent flier miles in exchange for rooting out system bugs is "brilliant!" That's what United Airlines is doing, and it's already given out two of its highest awards available -- one million miles -- which is enough to redeem for dozens of domestic...
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Whether you use Snapchat to send goofy faces to friends and family, or fling more sultry looking photos to a lover, you probably don't want those snapshots falling into the wrong hands. Unfortunately for users in the United Kingdom, new legislation could force messaging applications to be less secure so the government...
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Be careful what you post in jest on social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and even YouTube, lest the U.S. government labels you as a potential terrorist threat. It's the online world we live in these days, and in an effort to thwart the bad guys (and gals) before they can do harm, a new bill would encourage...
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Remember when skirmishes were fought on land, air, and sea? They still are, though in today's world, you can add cyberspace to the list. Cyber warfare has become a point of focus, and lest anyone doubt it, consider that that the U.S. Navy is looking to buy zero-day exploits, particularly those used on commercial...
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Surfing the murkier regions of the Internet is hardly anonymous these days, but Britain’s government appears poised to require Britons to identify themselves before entering porn sites. The U.K. government is trying to find a way to verify user’s ages to prevent underage viewers from accessing adult content.
The...
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Researchers from security outfit ESET discovered that several thousand servers running Linux and BSD have unwittingly been sending out spam as a result of a previously undiscovered malware infection. This has been going on for more than 5 years, as the malware was able to stay hidden all this time due to its...
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When is it fair to deem a botnet "complex"? Well, I think it's fair to label it as such when it requires a collection of cybercrime fighters from the US and Europe to ultimately give it its final blow.
Here's some context: "On 8 April, Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) and the Joint Cybercrime Action...
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uTorrent might still be one of the -- if not the -- most popular BitTorrent clients in the world, but that doesn't mean that it's one that everyone is happy with. In recent years, the software has suffered the fate of so many others: It was awesome in the beginning -- lightweight and stable -- but over time grew...
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Sometimes, it just makes sense to go open source. We've seen Microsoft do it, and we've seen Google do it. Now, we see none other than the US Department of Defense do it, with DShell, a network foresnics tool.
It's an impressive thing to see the DoD release a home-built tool to the wild, but like most moves to open source, the agency has
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An 18-year-old man living in the U.K. was picked up and arrested in Southport as part of an investigation into distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that brought down Sony's PlayStation Network (PSN) and Microsoft's Xbox Live service on Christmas Day. The investigation is part of a joint effort between U.K...
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A couple of official social media accounts of the United States' Central Command have been breached today, with the Islamic State militant group ISIS claiming responsibility.
Both the Twitter and YouTube accounts of the Central Command were accessed to change both the banner and profile picture, as well as add a couple of messages. On the
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When North Korea's laughable Internet connection went down last month, many wondered if that was the result of U.S. forces responding "proportionately" to the massive cyberattack against Sony Pictures Entertainment, just as President Barack Obama promised just days prior to the outage. North Korea certainly thought so. However, the response
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Government agencies are prime targets for many hackers (particularly those funded by other governments), so it’s not surprising that the State Department was recently attacked. What makes the attack unusual is that it appears to have been successful, with unclassified systems being compromised, including...
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Some Steam users are waking up to an unpleasant surprise after falling for a scam on Amazon's Twitch streaming service. According to the security gurus at F-Secure, there's an insidious piece of malware going around that involves a Twitch-bot bombarding the service's chat channels with invites to participate in a weekly raffle. The supposed...
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