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Don't worry — Julian Assange is alive and kicking! But his Internet connection is dead. Earlier today, Wikileaks tweeted that its co-founder, Julian Assange, had his internet connection intentionally cut by an unidentified " state party ." The non-profit organization said it had " activated appropriate contingency plans ," giving no further explanation. The tweet came after Wikileaks posted a series of three cryptic tweets , each containing a 64-character code. In no time, the tweets sparked bizarre rumors that Julian Assange has died. The tweets referenced Ecuador, Secretary of State John Kerry and the United Kingdom's Foreign Commonwealth Office. What exactly are those Mysterious Wikileaks Tweets? Some users on Twitter, Reddit, and various discussion forums speculated that the tweets in question were the result of a " dead man's switch " that has been triggered in the event of Julian Assange's untimely death. Users on Twitter a...

The UK's Signals Intelligence and Cyber Security agency GCHQ has launched its first ever puzzle book, challenging researchers and cryptographers to crack codes for charity. Dubbed " The GCHQ Puzzle Book ," the book features more than 140 pages of codes, puzzles, and challenges created by expert code breakers at the British intelligence agency. Ranging from easy to complex, the GCHQ challenges include ciphers and tests of numeracy and literacy, substitution codes, along with picture and music challenges. Writing in the GCHQ Puzzle Book's introduction, here's what GCHQ Director, Robert Hannigan says: "For nearly one hundred years, the men and women of GCHQ, both civilian and military, have been solving problems. They have done so in pursuit of our mission to keep the United Kingdom safe. GCHQ has a proud history of valuing and supporting individuals who think differently; without them, we would be of little value to the country. Not all are geniuses ...

Over two months ago, the world's third largest Bitcoin Exchange Bitfinex lost around $72 Million worth of Bitcoins in a major hack. Shortly after the company encountered a $72,000,000 Bitcoin theft, an unnamed Bitfinex user from Cambridge, Massachusetts, filed a police report in September, alleging that $1.3 Million of funds were stolen from his account. Since then the Cambridge police have handed the case over to the FBI, which is working with the Bitcoin exchange as well as European authorities to recover funds stolen from the Bitfinex user, Coindesk reports . The individual claimed that he held $3.4 Million in Bitcoin in his personal wallet hosted by the Bitfinex Bitcoin exchange. But following the August's Bitfinex breach, he was left with $2.1 Million in his account. Bitfinex then notified the individual of his initial loss of approximately $1.3 Million in Bitcoin, but after the company issued IOU tokens as an emergency measure to keep the exchange operating, the l...

While some payment card companies like Mastercard have switched to selfies as an alternative to passwords when verifying IDs for online payments, hackers have already started taking advantage of this new security verification methods. Researchers have discovered a new Android banking Trojan that masquerades primarily as a video plugin, like Adobe Flash Player, pornographic app, or video codec, and asks victims to send a selfie holding their ID card, according to a blog post published by McAfee. The Trojan is the most recent version of Acecard that has been labeled as one of the most dangerous Android banking Trojans known today, according to Kaspersky Lab Anti-malware Research Team. Once successfully installed, the trojan asks users for a number of device's permissions to execute the malicious code and then waits for victims to open apps, specifically those where it would make sense to request payment card information. Acecard Steals your Payment Card and Real ID det...

Are your internet-connected devices spying on you? Perhaps. We already know that the Internet of Thing (IoT) devices are so badly insecure that hackers are adding them to their botnet network for launching Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against target services. But, these connected devices are not just limited to conduct DDoS attacks ; they have far more potential to harm you. New research [ PDF ] published by the content delivery network provider Akamai Technologies shows how unknown threat actors are using a 12-year-old vulnerability in OpenSSH to secretly gain control of millions of connected devices. The hackers then turn, what researchers call, these " Internet of Unpatchable Things " into proxies for malicious traffic to attack internet-based targets and 'internet-facing' services, along with the internal networks that host them. Unlike recent attacks via Mirai botnet , the new targeted attack, dubbed SSHowDowN Proxy , specifically ma...