Fraudsters hacked the database of Bitcoin service Instawallet, according to IDG News Service. The storing service acknowledged the security breach, but didn’t say how many bitcoins were stolen. The company also suspended the service indefinitely and plans to develop a new architecture. “Our database was fraudulently accessed, [and] due to the very nature of Instawallet it is impossible to reopen the service...

Some 14,000 mobile devices belonging to the US Military Academy and the US Army Corps of Engineers were found lacking proper security policies. The devices, used by Army personnel and civilians, were given access to sensitive and critical military networks and data. The IG report found that no management software was installed on any of the devices, and that no remote wipe function was added in case they we...

The European ATM Security Team, or EAST, issued a warning that skimming attacks on all types of ATMs have intensified. Everything from bank ATMs to bus ticket machines and point-of-sale terminals have been hit by attacks, all resulting in significant financial losses. Common methods involving card skimming have been replaced by physically stealing ATM machines or placing fake display screens and pads that r...

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI issued a warning to public-safety call centers about numerous attacks against public emergency communications networks in US in a new extortion scam.  The attack, called telephony denial of service (TDoS), overwhelms emergency phone lines with automatically generated calls aimed at crushing the networks and blocking legitimate incoming and outgoing calls...

Using shortened website links, compromised blogs and Google’s own translate service, scammers managed to avoid filters in an effective new spam tactic. Pharmaceutical spam made its way to inboxes via compromised WordPress blogs that were used in conjunction with Yahoo’s URL shortening service to translate spammy websites.  Once clicked, users are redirected to websites promoting pharmaceutical content. “One...

A freshly-discovered flaw in the Berkley Internet Name Daemon (BIND) could allow an attacker to bring the DNS server to a grinding halt through the use of regular expressions. The vulnerability is known as CVE-2013-2266 and affects Linux and Unix versions of BIND from 9.7.x, 9.8.0 to 9.8.5b1 and 9.9.0 to 9.9.3b1, but not similar versions running on Windows. When successfully exploited, the named process sta...

Almost 2,000 storage buckets from cloud provider Amazon are inadvertently exposing confidential user data due to improper configuration by the customer, according to a study by Metasploit vendor Rapid7. Buckets are logical storage containers that companies use for purposes from mirroring downloads to storing office documents or local backups. They can be set as either public or private, and access to the fi...

A 37-year-old Anonymous member faces up to five years in prison if found guilty of a DDoS attack against a multinational company, according to IT World. If convicted, he may also be forced to pay up to $500,000 fines. Eric J. Rosol from the US state of Wisconsin allegedly participated in the attack on a website of the Koch Industries back in February 2011. The firm is involved in several businesses, includi...

The DDoS attack that hit SpamHaus this week was huge, but not as global as first thought, according to Venture Beat. The Internet Traffic Report shows the response time has been “pretty steady for the past 30 days, with no discernible dip in the past week, and packet loss globally has remained steady at almost zero.” Venture Beat also looked at the InternetPulse, which revealed that the internet in the US w...

Remnants of files uploaded to cloud services were retrieved by researchers at the University of Glasgow, pointing to poor encryption and major security gap. By using forensic software on smartphones that uploaded files to cloud services, researchers were able to piece together bits of data that revealed the cloud location of the uploaded files and other sensitive information. "That smartphones can essential...