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...

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 ...

Cyber criminals stole more than $500 million last year, according to the latest IC3 study based on reported incidents. In 2012, the organization received almost 300,000 complaints, an average of more than 24,000 a month. Compared to the previous year, losses by users tricked over the Internet increased by 8.3 percent. Almost half of the complaints reported financial losses, and most of the users bilked last...

Barclays Wealth & Investment Management is testing the biometrics solution offered by Nuance’s FreeSpeech to authenticate phone customers. The bank identifies customers by checking callers’ voices against pre-recorded customers’ voice patterns. The bank logs the vocal sample without customers’ knowledge, by recording several calls after  security identification checks are passed by its clients. A 20 to ...

Microsoft released a temporary fix for the Internet explorer bug that hackers exploited to break the website of the US Department of Labor last week. Attackers can exploit the hole by convincing users to visit compromised websites after clicking a link in an e-mail or Instant Messenger message. The vulnerability allowed remote code execution on Internet Explorer 8 version and spread to other websites as wel...

A number of Dutch ministerial sites were brought offline for several hours by a massive distributed-denial of service attack. "The government's sites have been the target of a DDoS attack since last night around 8:00 pm,'' deputy director Robert Wester told the AFP. The sites remained offline throughout the night as IT teams tried to restore access to the affected services. This is not an isolated incident:...

An article published in MacWorld earlier today about an iPhone application labeled as malicious has raised a number of concerns among users. Upon Ars Technica’s request, we looked into the issue and here’s a run-down of what we found: Sample MP3 header and metadata. Not related to this malicious incident. Today, an iOS user noticed that the $2 game Simply Find It developed by Simply Game is detected as pote...

Java applets may fully compromise Notes users with just one click from cyber-criminals sending them through HTML e-mails, according to an IBM security advisory. The vulnerabilities affect 8.0.x, 8.5.x, and the new Notes 9 versions, but the company promises to soon fix the problems. “This would allow attackers to compromise users reading/previewing an email” through “arbitrary code executions,” IBM says. Ful...