A new point-of-sale (POS) skimmer, used for lifting credit card details and PIN data at retail locations, has gone on sale for thousands of dollars on semi-private underground crime forums. The skimmer is notable in that it can be installed and removed…
700 Domains seized by ICE, Europol and Hong Kong Customs on Cyber Monday
This year’s Cyber Monday, traditionally the start of the holiday online shopping season, marked the end of it for more than 700 websites involved in selling counterfeit merchandise – all seized in a joint operation between ICE (297), Europol (393) and …
Javascript Sidedoors Vulnerability Affects Thousands of Mobile Apps
This story has been temporarily removed, due to dispute with the report the story was based on. We are awaiting amends from the report authors before re-posting an updated story.
FBI Issues Warning on ‘Man-in-the-E-mail’ Fraud Attacks
Man-in-the-email is a variation on the man-in-the-middle attack. In this fraud the attacker takes an e-mail position between a buyer and seller, and is able to defraud the buyer out of funds and the seller out of goods. The FBI knows at least three US …
Bitcoin Mining: There’s a Right Way and a PUP Way
With the value of bitcoins having tipped $1000, bitcoin mining is increasingly attractive; but it is also resource-intensive, and the ‘bounty’ earned by miners is dropping. One company has built a specialist data center to do the mining; another dubiou…
90,000 Patients Compromised at UW Medicine
The University of Washington Medical Center (UW Medicine) was breached in October, with data of up to 90,000 patients of the Harborview Medical Center and University of Washington Medical Center affected. No medical data was stolen, but SSNs may have b…
Blackshades RAT Has a Resurgence
A prominent remote administration tool (RAT) known as Blackshades is seeing an uptick lately, despite one of its authors having been arrested last year.
The Paradox of OSS: More Secure by Definition; Often Less Secure in Use
One side-effect of the Snowden revelations and rumors and accusations of government-inspired backdoors in mainstream software products is increased interest in open source software (OSS). But while OSS comes with more inherent trust, it is often used w…
Defeating Eavesdropping in Wireless Communications
While it is possible – to some degree – to protect a physical cable, wireless communications are out in the open, ready to be plucked from the air. Encryption has been considered the only way to protect wireless data – until now.
Mass Surveillance: EU Gets More Cooperation From Washington Than London
It was clear last week that the European Parliament’s demand for legal redress in US courts for Europeans whose rights may have been infringed by US surveillance would be a sticking point in negotiations between the EU and US over data sharing. Now com…