Cyber Security News

A massive government data belonging to the Oklahoma Department of Securities (ODS) was left unsecured on a storage server for at least a week, exposing a whopping 3 terabytes of data containing millions of sensitive files. The unsecured storage server, discovered by Greg Pollock, a researcher with cybersecurity firm UpGuard, also contained decades worth of confidential case files from the Oklahoma ...

Ukrainian Police have this week busted out two separate groups of hackers involved in carrying out DDoS attacks against news agencies and stealing money from Ukrainian citizens, respectively. According to the authorities, the four suspected hackers they arrested last week, all aged from 26 to 30 years, stole more than 5 million Hryvnia (around 178,380 USD) from the bank accounts of ...

A 23-year-old hacker from Utah pleaded guilty this week to launching a series of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks against multiple online services, websites, and online gaming companies between 2013 and 2014. According to a Justice Department (DoJ) press release, Austin Thompson, a.k.a. “DerpTroll,” took down servers of several major gaming platforms including Electronic Arts’ Origin service, the Sony PlayStation network, and Valve Software’s ...

If you own an eCommerce website built on WordPress and powered by WooCommerce plugin, then beware of a new vulnerability that could compromise your online store. Simon Scannell, a researcher at RIPS Technologies GmbH, discovered an arbitrary file deletion vulnerability in the popular WooCommerce plugin that could allow a malicious or compromised privileged user to gain full control over the unpatched websites. WooCommerce is one the most ...

A team of security researchers has discovered another serious side-channel vulnerability in Intel CPUs that could allow an attacker to sniff out sensitive protected data, like passwords and cryptographic keys, from other processes running in the same CPU core with simultaneous multi-threading feature enabled. Discovered by a team of security researchers from the Tampere University of Technology in Finland and ...

Facebook has finally been slapped with its first fine of £500,000 for allowing political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica to improperly gather and misuse data of 87 million users. The fine has been imposed by the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and was calculated using the UK’s old Data Protection Act 1998 which can levy a maximum penalty of £500,000 — ironically ...

Cybersecurity firm FireEye claims to have discovered evidence that proves the involvement of a Russian-owned research institute in the development of the TRITON malware that caused some industrial systems to unexpectedly shut down last year, including a petrochemical plant in Saudi Arabia. TRITON, also known as Trisis, is a piece of ICS malware designed to target the Triconex Safety Instrumented System (SIS) ...

Security researchers have discovered a serious code execution vulnerability in the LIVE555 Streaming Media library—which is being used by popular media players including VLC and MPlayer, along with a number of embedded devices capable of streaming media. LIVE555 streaming media, developed and maintained by Live Networks, is a set of C++ libraries companies and application developers use to stream multimedia over ...

All major web browsers, including Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, and Mozilla Firefox, altogether today announced to soon remove support for TLS 1.0 (20-year-old) and TLS 1.1 (12-year-old) communication encryption protocols. Developed initially as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol, Transport Layer Security (TLS) is an updated cryptographic protocol used to establish a secure and encrypted communications channel ...

In an effort to secure users’ data while maintaining privacy, Google has announced a new security measure for Android Backup Service that now encrypts all your backup data stored on its cloud servers in a way that even the company can’t read it. Google allows Android users to automatically backup their essential app data and settings to their Google account, allowing them ...