The Dutch increasingly keep extra cash at home after the recent DDoS attacks targeting the country’s infrastructure and financial institutions, according to the Virus Bulletin. The month-long attacks persuaded a quarter of Dutch citizens to follow advice from Nibud, a charity organization that aims to make families more aware of their finances. Last month, ING clients reportedly lost hundreds of euros and w...

A New York detective was arrested after allegedly spying on over 30 people, including police colleagues, to discover if any of them was sleeping with his ex, according to The Register. The 42-year-old cop hired hackers to get their usernames and passwords. Edwin Vargas allegedly spent over $4,000 for email-hacking services, and appeared before a magistrate judge charged with conspiracy to commit computer ha...

The 2012 Internet Census published earlier this year revealed that embedded devices are facing serious security threats when connected to the Internet. The issue appears bigger than expected, according to Metasploit maker HD Moore’s presentation at AusCERT2013. Embedded devices – an umbrella term defining specialized appliances that run their own operating system such as GPS receivers, industrial equipment,...

Guantanamo Bay Naval Base shut down its wireless connection to bar prisoners from accessing the Internet. Inmates are also denied access to their social networking accounts on Twitter and Facebook, after Anonymous made public its plans to “shut down Guantanamo” to mark the 100th day of inmates’ hunger strike. Army Lt. Col. Samuel House told Associated Press “the precautions were taken because of online thre...

Kids start watching porn online from as early as the age of 6, and flirting on the Internet from the age of 8, according to a Bitdefender marketing study of over 19,000 parents worldwide. The antivirus company’s marketing research shows the age of kids accessing instant messaging and computer games is decreasing. Some 3.45% of children chatting with IM friends and 2 percent of computer game addicts are five...

Large Internet Service Providers in the UK have started blocking access to Movie2K and Download4All, two popular file sharing websites accused of distributing pirated materials. British web providers including BT, Virgin, Talk Talk, Sky and EE were compelled to bar their users from reaching the sites after the Motion Picture Association (MPA) obtained a court order to shut down the activities of the two web...

The Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s Unit 61396 is again hitting US high-profile targets, including government agencies, top tier companies and media groups, after a three-month break, according to security industry representatives and US officials. The cyber unit of the China’s People’s Liberation Army resumed their attacks against American strategic targets with new tools and command-and-control network...

The Japanese division of Yahoo may have leaked roughly 22 million user IDs in a hack targeted at their administrative system. According to a news report from SecurityWeek, the extent of the damage is still unknown, but the company presumes user data may have been exfiltrated from Yahoo! Japan servers. "We don't know if the file was leaked or not, but we can't deny the possibility given the volume of traffic...

The Bitdefender labs are currently working on an analysis of a Mac OS X backdoor that has been discovered by independent security researcher Jacob Applebaum on an Angolan activist. The victim, who had fallen victim to a phishing scam, ended up installing a malicious piece of code that acts as a backdoor, taking screenshots, and then uploading them to the command and control center. While relatively basic, t...

Organized crime, data theft, and other “old school” methods for stealing information have re-gained control over the internet underworld  in the past year, shoving aside the hacktivists who had dominated the virtual landscape from 2011. Verizon's Data Breach Report is the best place to explore the reasons behind such a change. This report comprises millions of lost records, cataloging some 47,000 incidents ...