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The FBI arrested a 25-year-old NSA contractor on Saturday (3rd June) for leaking classified information to an online news outlet which published its report yesterday (5th June) — meaning the arrest was made two days before the actual disclosure went online. Reality Leigh Winner , who held a top-secret security clearance and worked as a government contractor in Georgia with Pluribus International, was arrested from her home in Augusta on charges involving the leak of top-secret NSA files to 'The Intercept,' an online publication that has been publishing NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden since 2014. The Intercept published a report on Monday, 5th June, based upon a classified document it received anonymously, which claims in August 2016, Russia's military intelligence agency "executed a cyber attack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials days before [the] election." The ...

" If you want to keep living, Pay a ransom, or die ." This could happen, as researchers have found thousands of vulnerabilities in Pacemakers that hackers could exploit. Millions of people that rely on pacemakers to keep their hearts beating are at risk of software glitches and hackers, which could eventually take their lives. A pacemaker is a small electrical battery-operated device that's surgically implanted in the chest to help control the heartbeats. This device uses low-energy electrical pulses to stimulate the heart to beat at a normal rate. While cyber security firms are continually improving software and security systems to protect systems from hackers, medical devices such as insulin pumps or pacemakers are also vulnerable to life-threatening hacks. In a recent study, researchers from security firm White Scope analysed seven pacemaker products from four different vendors and discovered that they use more than 300 third-party libraries, 174 of which are...

Remember Ramona Fricosu ? A Colorado woman was ordered to unlock her encrypted Toshiba laptop while the FBI was investigating alleged mortgage fraud in 2012, but she declined to decrypt the laptop saying that she did not remember the password. Later the United States Court ruled that Police can force defendants to decrypt their electronic devices, of course, as it does not violate the Fifth Amendment that prevents any citizen from having to incriminate themselves. Forgetting passwords for your electronic devices could be a smart move to avoid complying with a court order, but not every time, as US judges have different opinions on how to punish those who do not compel the order to unlock their phones. On a single day last week, one defendant got six months jail for allegedly refusing to reveal his iPhone passcode, while a second defendant walks through after he claimed he forgot his passcode. A Florida circuit court judge ruled last week that child abuse defendant Christopher ...

Until last year, cyber criminals were only targeting computers of individuals and organisations with ransomware and holding them for ransom, but then they started targeting unprotected online databases and servers around the globe for ransom as well. Earlier this year, we saw notorious incidents where tens of thousands of unprotected MongoDB and Elasticsearch databases were hacked and held for ransom in exchange of the data the hackers had stolen and deleted from the poorly configured systems. Now, cyber crooks have started targeting unprotected Hadoop Clusters and CouchDB servers as well, making the ransomware game nastier if your servers are not securely configured. Nearly 4,500 servers with the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) — the primary distributed storage used by Hadoop applications — were found exposing more than 5,000 Terabytes (5.12 Petabytes) of data, according to an analysis conducted using Shodan search engine. This exposure is due to the same issue — H...

Last month  WannaCry ransomware  hit more than 300,000 PCs across the world within just 72 hours by using its self-spreading capabilities to infect vulnerable Windows PCs, particularly those using vulnerable versions of the OS, within the same network. But that doesn't mean WannaCry was a high-quality piece of ransomware. Security researchers have recently discovered some programming errors in the code of the WannaCrypt ransomware worm that might allow victims to restore their locked files without paying for any decryption key. After deeply analysing the WannaCry code, security company at Kaspersky Lab found that the ransomware was full of mistakes that could allow some of its victims to restore their files with publicly available free recovery tools or even with simple commands. Anton Ivanov, senior malware analyst at Kaspersky Lab, along with colleagues Fedor Sinitsyn and Orkhan Mamedov, detailed three critical errors made by WannaCry developers that could allow sy...

WikiLeaks has published a new batch of the ongoing Vault 7 leak , this time detailing an alleged CIA project that allowed the agency to turn Windows file servers into covert attack machines that can silently infect other computers of interest inside a targeted network. Codenamed Pandemic , the tool is a persistent implant for Microsoft Windows machines that share files with remote users on a local network. The documents leaked by the whistleblower organisation date from April 2014 to January 2015. According to WikiLeaks, Pandemic infect networks of Windows computers through the Server Message Block (SMB) file sharing protocol by replacing application code on-the-fly with a trojanized version of the software. "Pandemic is a tool which is run as kernel shellcode to install a file system filter driver," a leaked CIA manual reads. "The filter will 'replace' a target file with the given payload file when a remote user accesses the file via SMB (read-only, not w...