The big words in malware these days are CryptoLocker and CryptoWall, the two variants of an emerging group of malware known as “ransomware.” That term is a very apt categorization of what this type of malicious software does: it holds your data and files hostage, demanding ransom payment to unlock and regain access to your personal information.
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Hackers steal millions of Minecraft passwords
Hackers have stolen login data for more than seven million members of the Minecraft site Lifeboat.
Lifeboat lets members run servers for customized, multiplayer maps for the smartphone edition of Minecraft.
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Adware from French runs away and hides on 12M machines
Cisco’s Warren Mercer and Matthew Molyett are warning that software downloaded from sites run by French firm Tuto4PC likely included trojan backdoors. The Borg’s security arm, Talos, thinks some 12 million machines have been infected.
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Vanity dating site BeautifulPeople popped
A December breach dismissed as minor at the time has turned ugly for dating-for-narcissists site BeautifulPeople.
Security researcher and architect of HaveIBeenPwned, Troy Hunt, has told Forbes ‘net scum are now offering data from a million BP users for sale.
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All phones in India to be equipped with panic buttons from 2017
There were 337,922 crimes against women reported in India in 2014. That’s over 900 crimes a day, or around one every two minutes.
The country’s government hopes to battle this problem with technology. Officials announced on Monday that all mobile phones sold in the country from January 2017 will need to be kitted out with a panic button feature,
Reuters reports.
Hacking group “PLATINUM” used Windows’ own patching system against it
Microsoft’s Windows Defender Advanced Threat Hunting team works to track down and identify hacking groups that perpetrate attacks. The focus is on the groups that are the most selective about their targets and that work the hardest to stay undetected. The company
wrote today about one particular group that it has named PLATINUM.
If you use Waze, hackers can stalk you
Millions of drivers use Waze, a Google-owned navigation app, to find the best, fastest route from point A to point B. And according to a new study, all of those people run the risk of having their movements tracked by hackers.
Researchers at the University of California-Santa Barbara recently discovered a Waze vulnerability that allowed them to create thousands of “ghost drivers” that can monitor the drivers around them—an exploit that could be used to track Waze users in real-time. They proved it to me by tracking my own movements around San Francisco and Las Vegas over a three-day period.
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Businesses pay $100,000 to DDoS extortionists who never DDoS anyone
In less than two months, online businesses have paid more than $100,000 to scammers who set up a fake distributed denial-of-service gang that has yet to launch a single attack.
Bangladesh hack ‘targeted bank system software’
British defence contractor BAE Systems has claimed bank hackers in Bangladesh targeted software from Swift, a key part of the global financial system.
According to a report from the Reuters news agency, BAE made the discovery after investigating the theft of $81 million (£56m) from the Bangladesh central bank in February.
‘No password’ database error exposes info on 93 million Mexican voters
AWS-hosted MongoDB database configured incorrectly
Information on 93 million Mexican voters has been leaked online.
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