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Dixons Carphone's 2017 data breach was worse than initially anticipated. In an announcement on Monday, Dixons Carphone, one of the largest consumer electronics and telecommunication retailers in Europe, admitted that the breach affected around 10 million customers, up from an initial estimate of 1.2 million people the company acknowledged back in June. The company, which has been investigating the hack since it was discovered in June this year, said the investigation is nearly over and now there is evidence that some of the data may have been taken from its systems. The Carphone Warehouse and Currys PC World owner said the hackers may have accessed personal information of its affected customers including their names, addresses and email addresses last year. The hackers also got access to 5.9 million payments cards used at Currys PC World and Dixons Travel, but nearly all of those cards were protected by the chip-and-pin system . However, Dixons Carphone assured its cust...

An activist has just leaked thousands of private messages of an organization that's been known to publishing others' secrets. More than 11,000 direct messages from a Twitter group used by WikiLeaks and around 10 close supporters have been posted online by journalist and activist Emma Best, exposing private chats between 2015 and 2017. The leaked chats have been referenced by American media outlets earlier this year, but for the very first time, all 11,000 messages have been published online, allowing anyone to scroll through and read messages themselves. "The chat is presented nearly in its entirety, with less than a dozen redactions made to protect the privacy and personal information of innocent, third parties. The redactions don't include any information that's relevant to WikiLeaks or their activities," Best said. The leaked DMs of the private Twitter chat group, dubbed " Wikileaks +10 " by Best, show WikiLeak's strong Republican favoritism, ...

Another day, Another data breach! This time-sensitive and personal data of hundreds of thousands of people at Boys Town National Research Hospital have been exposed in what appears to be the largest ever reported breach by a pediatric care provider or children's hospital. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights, the breach incident affected 105,309 individuals , including patients and employees, at the Omaha-based medical organization. In a "Notice of Data Security Incident" published on its website, the Boys Town National Research Hospital admitted that the organization became aware of an abnormal behavior regarding one of its employees' email account on May 23, 2018. After launching a forensic investigation, the hospital found that an unknown hacker managed to infiltrate into the employee's email account and stole personal information stored within the email account as a result of unauthorized access. T...

Again some bad news for cryptocurrency users. KICKICO, a blockchain-based initial coin offering (ICO) support platform, has fallen victim to a suspected cyber attack and lost more than 70 million KICK tokens (or KickCoins) worth an estimated $7.7 million. In a statement released on its Medium post on July 26, the company acknowledged the security breach, informing its customers that an unknown attacker managed to gain access to the account of the KICK smart contracts and the tokens of the KICKICO platform on last Thursday at around 9:04 (UTC). KICKICO admitted that the company had no clue about the security breach until and unless several of its customers fell victim and complained about losing KickCoin tokens worth $800,000 from their wallets overnight. However, after investigating, the company found that the total amount of stolen funds was 70,000,000 KickCoin, which, at the current exchange rate, is equivalent to $ 7.7 million. KICKICO reported that suspected attackers...

Following Apple's lead in banning cryptocurrency mining apps , Google has also updated its Play Store policy this week to ban apps that mine cryptocurrencies on users' devices in the background. However, there are countless cryptocurrency mining apps, including MinerGate, AA Miner, NeoNeonMiner, and Crypto Miner, still available on the Play Store. Cryptocurrency mining is not a new concept, but the technology has recently been abused in the past year after hackers found it a great way to make millions of dollars by hijacking PCs to secretly mine cryptocurrency in the background without their users' knowledge or consent. Due to this practice, cryptocurrency mining has emerged as one of the biggest threats , raising negative sentiments towards this alternative revenue scheme, and big tech giants like Apple and Google took strict measures to put restrictions on such apps. Over a month ago, Apple updated its App Store guidelines to ban cryptocurrency mining apps and...

A team of security researchers has discovered a new Spectre attack that can be launched over the network, unlike all other Spectre variants that require some form of local code execution on the target system. Dubbed " NetSpectre ," the new remote side-channel attack, which is related to Spectre variant 1, abuses speculative execution to perform bounds-check bypass and can be used to defeat address-space layout randomization on the remote system. If you're unaware, the original Spectre Variant 1 flaw (CVE-2017-5753), which was reported earlier this year along with another Spectre and Meltdown flaws , leverages speculative stores to create speculative buffer overflows in the CPU store cache. Speculative execution is a core component of modern processors design that speculatively executes instructions based on assumptions that are considered likely to be true. If the assumptions come out to be valid, the execution continues and is discarded if not. This issue could...

Almost three years after the arrest of two young Dutch brothers, who pleaded guilty to their involvement in creating and distributing CoinVault ransomware malware , a district court in Rotterdam today sentenced them to 240 hours of community service. In 2015, the two suspects — Melvin (25-year-old) and Dennis van den B. (21-year-old) — were arrested from Amersfoort on suspicion of involvement in CoinVault ransomware attacks. The duo was arrested by law enforcement with the help of researchers from Kaspersky Labs , who reverse-engineered the malware and found the full name of one of the suspects and their IP address left accidentally on the command and control server. CoinVault ransomware campaign that began in May 2014 was one of the most successful file-encrypting ransomware program of its time that encrypted over 14,000 Windows computers worldwide, primarily the Netherlands, the US, the UK, Germany, and France. Just like other ransomware attacks, the sole intent of CoinVau...

At Google Cloud Next '18 convention in San Francisco, the company has introduced Titan Security Keys —a tiny USB device, similar to Yubico's YubiKey, that offers hardware-based two-factor authentication for your online accounts with the highest level of protection against phishing attacks. These hardware-based security keys are thought to be more efficient at preventing phishing, man-in-the-middle (MITM) and other types of account-takeover attacks than 2FA via SMS, as even if your credentials are compromised, account login is impossible without that physical key. Earlier this week Google revealed that its 85,000 employees have been using physical security keys internally for months and since then none of them have fallen victim to phishing attacks. Compared with the traditional authentication protocols ( SMS messages ), Universal 2nd Factor Authentication (U2F) is extremely difficult to compromise that aims to simplify, fasten and secure two-factor authentication proc...

India-linked highly targeted mobile malware campaign, first unveiled two weeks ago , has been found to be part of a broader campaign targeting multiple platforms, including windows devices and possibly Android as well. As reported in our previous article , earlier this month researchers at Talos threat intelligence unit discovered a group of Indian hackers abusing mobile device management (MDM) service to hijack and spy on a few targeted iPhone users in India. Operating since August 2015, the attackers have been found abusing MDM service to remotely install malicious versions of legitimate apps, including Telegram, WhatsApp, and PrayTime, onto targeted iPhones. These modified apps have been designed to secretly spy on iOS users, and steal their real-time location, SMS, contacts, photos and private messages from third-party chatting applications. During their ongoing investigation, Talos researchers identified a new MDM infrastructure and several malicious binaries – designed...

Starting today with the release of Chrome 68, Google Chrome prominently marks all non-HTTPS websites as 'Not Secure' in its years-long effort to make the web a more secure place for Internet users. So if you are still running an insecure HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) website, many of your visitors might already be greeted with a 'Not Secure' message on their Google Chrome browser warning them that they can't trust your website to be secure. By displaying ' Not Secure ,' Google Chrome means that your connection is not secure because there is no SSL Certificate to encrypt your connection between your computer and the website's server. So, anything sent over a non-HTTPS connection is in plain text, like your password or payment card information, allowing attackers to snoop or tamper with your data. The non-https connection has been considered dangerous particularly for web pages that transfer sensitive information—like login pages and payment...