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TalkTalk, one of the biggest UK-based Telecoms company with 4 million customers, has been issued with a record £400,000 ($510,000) fine for failings to implement the most basic security measures to prevent the hack that made global headlines last year. The penalty has been imposed by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) over the high-profile cyber attack occurred in the company last October, which allowed hackers to steal the personal data of its 156,959 customers "with ease." The ICO said on Wednesday that TalkTalk, which offers TV, phone and broadband services, could have prevented the cyber attack if the company had implemented even basic security measures to protect its customers' data. The hacked data of 156,959 customers included full names, postal addresses, dates of birth, telephone numbers, email addresses and TalkTalk accounts information. The hacker also had even access to bank account details and sort codes in almost 16,000 cases. "When i...

Are you experiencing slow Internet speed on your MacBook today? — It's not just you! Here's Why: Following in Microsoft's footsteps , Apple has started " pre-downloading " the latest version of its desktop operating system, macOS 10.12 Sierra, in the background, if you are still running OS X El Capitan. If you have automatic downloads enabled on your Mac, a large file of around 5GB will mysteriously be downloaded to your computer in the background, using your Internet bandwidth for unrequested files. Apple justifies this move by saying that the automatic download would make it easier for users to get the newest operating system, encouraging them to update their Macs. The good news, however, is that the update will not install automatically without your permission. Once downloaded automatically in the background, users who are running OS X El Capitan version 10.11.5 or later will receive a notification that says macOS Sierra is ready to be installed....

Users are still dealing with the Yahoo's massive data breach that exposed over 1 Billion Yahoo accounts and there's another shocking news about the company that, I bet, will blow your mind. Yahoo might have provided your personal data to United States intelligence agency when required. Yahoo reportedly built a custom software programmed to secretly scan all of its users' emails for specific information provided by US intelligence officials, according to a report by Reuters . The tool was built in 2015 after company complied with a secret court order to scan hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail account at the behest of either the NSA or the FBI, according to the report that cites three separate sources who are familiar with the matter. According to some experts, this is the first time when an American Internet company has agreed to such an extensive demand by a spy agency's demand by searching all incoming emails, examining stored emails or scanning a small number...

Is Managing Customer Logins and Data Giving You Headaches? You're Not Alone! Today, we all expect super-fast, secure, and personalized online experiences. But let's be honest, we're also more careful about how our data is used. If something feels off, trust can vanish in an instant. Add to that the lightning-fast changes AI is bringing to everything from how we log in to spotting online fraud, and it's a whole new ball game! If you're dealing with logins, data privacy, bringing new users on board, or building digital trust, this webinar is for you . Join us for " Navigating Customer Identity in the AI Era ," where we'll dive into the Auth0 2025 Customer Identity Trends Report . We'll show you what's working, what's not, and how to tweak your strategy for the year ahead. In just one session, you'll get practical answers to real-world challenges like: How AI is changing what users expect – and where they're starting to push ba...

Do you trust your messaging app even though it uses end-to-end encryption? As I previously said end-to-end encryption doesn't mean that your messages are secure enough to hide your trace. It's because most of the messaging apps still record and store a lot of metadata on your calls and messages that could reveal some of your personal information including dates and durations of communication, as well as the participants' phone numbers. Apple's iMessage app is the most recent and best example of this scenario. Just recently it was reported that the company stores a lot of information about its end-to-end encrypted iMessage, that could reveal your contacts and location, and even share this data with law enforcement via court orders. But if you are using open source end-to-end encrypted Signal   app, you are on the safer side. Trust me! As we previously reported that the Signal app, which is widely considered the most secure of all other encrypted messaging a...

Wikileaks completed its 10 years today, and within this timespan, the whistleblower site has published over 10 million documents, and there's more to come. In the name of celebration of its 10th Anniversary, Wikileaks promises to leak documents pertaining to Google, United States presidential election and more over the next ten weeks. Speaking by video link to an anniversary news conference at the Volksbuhne Theater in Berlin on Tuesday morning, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange eagerly announced his plans to release a series of publications every week for the next 10 weeks. The upcoming leaks will include "significant material" related to Google, the US presidential election, military operations, arms trading and, the hot topic of past few years, mass surveillance. Assange also promised to publish all documents related to the US presidential race before the election day on November 8. "There is an enormous expectation in the United States," Assange said f...

Researchers have disclosed a critical zero-day vulnerability in the JPEG 2000 image file format parser implemented in OpenJPEG library , which could allow an attacker to remotely execute arbitrary code on the affected systems. Discovered by security researchers at Cisco Talos group, the zero-day flaw, assigned as TALOS-2016-0193/ CVE-2016-8332 , could allow an out-of-bound heap write to occur that triggers the heap corruption and leads to arbitrary code execution. OpenJPEG is an open-source JPEG 2000 codec. Written in C language, the software was developed for coding and encoding JPEG2000 images, a format that is often used for tasks like embedding image files within PDF documents through popular software including PdFium, Poppler, and MuPDF. Hackers can exploit the security vulnerability by tricking the victim into opening a specially crafted, malicious JPEG2000 image or a PDF document containing that malicious file in an email. The hacker could even upload the malicious JP...

Over a month ago, The Hacker News reported about the Dropbox Hack , where hackers had managed to steal more than 68 Million Dropbox accounts in a data breach that was initially disclosed by the online cloud storage platform in 2012. Although the initial announcement failed to reveal the true scale of the data breach, it was in late August when the breach notification service LeakBase obtained files containing details on over 68 million accounts, which contains email addresses and hashed passwords for Dropbox users. Last month, a hacker was selling this Dropbox data dump on a Dark Web marketplace known as TheRealDeal for around $1200 . However, Motherboard recently discovered that a researcher has just uploaded the full dump of hacked Dropbox database online. Download DropBox Data Dump Here: Thomas White, known online as The Cthulhu, uploaded Monday the full Dropbox data dump onto his website in a move, as he claims, to help security researchers examine the data breach. ...

With rapidly growing Internet of Thing (IoT) devices, they have become a much more attractive target for cybercriminals. Just recently we saw a record-breaking Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against the France-based hosting provider OVH that reached over one Terabit per second (1 Tbps), which was carried out via a botnet of infected IoT devices. Now, such attacks are expected to grow more rapidly as someone has just released the source code for IoT botnet, which was 'apparently' used to carry out world's largest DDoS attacks. Internet of Things-Botnet 'Mirai' Released Online Dubbed Mirai , the malware is a DDoS Trojan that targets BusyBox systems , a collection of Unix utilities specifically designed for embedded devices like routers. The malware is programmed to hijack connected IoT devices that are using the default usernames and passwords set by the factory before devices are first shipped to customers. Spotted by Brian Krebs , the...

Since the foundation of the Internet, a contract has been handed over to the United States Commerce Department under which the department had given authority to regulate the Internet. After 47 years, this contract ends tonight at midnight EDT i.e. Saturday, October 1st, 2016. If you think that the United States owns the Internet, then you're wrong. It doesn't. Founded in 1998, non-profit organization ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) oversees the Internet's "address book" (or root zone) — the process of assigning domain names and the underlying IP addresses to keep the Internet running smoothly. But according to the contract, ICANN and its IANA department (the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) was set to work under the supervision of National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce. That contract is ending today, and the US Commerce Department is schedule...

The massive data breach that Yahoo! confirmed to the world last week is claimed by the company to have been carried out by a "state-sponsored actor" in 2014, which exposed the accounts of at least 500 Million Yahoo users . But, now it seems that Yahoo has downplayed a mega data breach and trying to hide it's own security blunder. Recently the information security firm InfoArmor that analyzed the data breach refuted the Yahoo's claim, stating that the data breach was the work of seasoned cyber criminals who later sold the compromised Yahoo accounts to an Eastern European nation-state. Over 1 Billion Accounts May Have Been Hacked Now, there's one more twist in the unprecedented data heist. A recent advancement in the report indicates that the number of affected Yahoo accounts may be between 1 Billion and 3 Billion. An unnamed, former Yahoo executive who is familiar with the company's security says that the Yahoo's back-end system's arch...