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China's central bank today announced an immediate ban on all ICO—Initial Coin Offering—fundraising, to prevent fraud and illegal fundraising. ICO is the hottest new thing in the blockchain world, which is an alternative to crowdfunding that lets a firm raise funding from multiple sources. The People's Bank of China (PBoC), the country's central bank and financial regulator, has issued an official notice on Monday, forbidding "all types of currency issuance financing activities" that have "seriously disrupted the economic and financial order." This PBoC's bold move has been backed by many other Chinese government administrators and regulators including the China Securities Regulatory Commission, China Insurance Regulatory Commission and the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, and China Banking Regulatory Commission. This move marks the end of an era of ICO fundraising in China. The regulator claims that ICOs are being misused for "...

Exclusive — If you have an account on Taringa , also known as "The Latin American Reddit," your account details may have compromised in a massive data breach that leaked login details of almost all of its over 28 million users. Taringa is a popluar social network geared toward Latin American users, who create and share thousands of posts every day on general interest topics like life hacks, tutorials, recipes, reviews, and art. The Hacker News has been informed by LeakBase , a breach notification service, who has obtained a copy of the hacked database containing details on 28,722,877 accounts, which includes usernames, email addresses and hashed passwords for Taringa users. The hashed passwords use an ageing algorithm called MD5 – which has been considered outdated even before 2012 – that can easily be cracked, making Taringa users open to hackers. Wanna know how weak is MD5?, LeakBase team has already cracked 93.79 percent (nearly 27 Million) of hashed passwords s...

It's now official, Instagram has suffered a massive data breach , and reportedly an unknown hacker has stolen personal details of more than 6 million Instagram accounts. Just yesterday, we reported that Instagram had patched a critical API vulnerability that allowed the attacker to access phone numbers and email addresses for high-profile verified accounts. However, Instagram hack now appears to be more serious than initially reported. Not just a few thousands of high-profile users—it's more than 6 million Instagram users, including politicians, sports stars, and media companies, who have had their Instagram profile information, including email addresses and phone numbers, available for sale on a website, called Doxagram . The suspected Instagram hacker has launched Doxagram, an Instagram lookup service, where anyone can search for stolen information only for $10 per account. A security researcher from Kaspersky Labs, who also found the same vulnerability and rep...

Almost half a million people in the United States are highly recommended to get their pacemakers updated, as they are vulnerable to hacking. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recalled 465,000 pacemakers after discovering security flaws that could allow hackers to reprogram the devices to run the batteries down or even modify the patient's heartbeat, potentially putting half a million patients lives at risk. A pacemaker is a small electrical battery-operated device that's surgically implanted in the chest of patients to help control their heartbeats. The device uses low-energy electrical pulses to stimulate the heart to beat at a normal rate. Six types of pacemakers, all manufactured by health-tech firm Abbott (formerly of St. Jude Medical) are affected by the recall, which includes the Accent, Anthem, Accent MRI, Accent ST, Assurity, and Allure. All the affected models are radio-frequency enabled cardiac devices—typically fitted to patients with irregular he...

Whenever we feel like the Locky ransomware is dead, the notorious threat returns with a bang . Recently, researchers from two security firms have independently spotted two mass email campaigns, spreading two different, but new variants of the Locky ransomware . Lukitus Campaign Sends 23 Million Emails in 24 Hours The campaign spotted by researchers at AppRiver sent out more than 23 million messages containing Locky ransomware in just 24 hours on 28 August across the United States in what appears to be one of the largest malware campaigns in the second half of this year. According to the researchers, the emails sent out in the attack were "extremely vague," with subjects lines such as "please print," "documents," "images," "photos," "pictures," and "scans" in an attempt to convince victims into infecting themselves with Locky ransomware. The email comes with a ZIP attachment (hiding the malware payload) tha...

A team of hackers at the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, allegedly used a Windows hacking tool against its targets to gain persistent remote access. As part of its Vault 7 leaks , WikiLeaks today revealed details about a new implant developed by the CIA, dubbed AngelFire , to target computers running Windows operating system. AngelFire framework implants a persistent backdoor on the target Windows computers by modifying their partition boot sector. AngelFire framework consists five following components: 1. Solartime — it modifies the partition boot sector to load and execute the Wolfcreek (kernel code) every time the system boots up. 2. Wolfcreek — a self-loading driver (kernel code that Solartime executes) that loads other drivers and user-mode applications 3. Keystone — a component that utilizes DLL injection technique to execute the malicious user applications directly into system memory without dropping them into the file system. 4. BadMFS — a covert ...