Brian Krebs reports: Hospitality giant Hilton Hotels & Resorts recently started offering Hilton HHonors Awards members 1,000 free awards points to those who agreed to change their passwords for the online service prior to April 1, 2015, when the company said the change would become mandatory. Ironically, that same campaign led to the discovery of a simple yet powerful flaw…
Month: March 2015
UK: Urgent investigation into breach of benefit claimants’ data
Tom Potter reports a breach involving Colchester Borough Council: An urgent probe has been launched into how the personal details of benefit claimants were disclosed to some Colchester householders. The borough council is investigating the breach of personal data during the delivery of housing benefit notification letters to residents last week. […] The council said…
In: Decoder of secret information stolen, security agencies panic
From the where-is-Captain-Midnight-when-you-need-him dept.: Theft of an electronic instrument worth around Rs 3 lakh [$4816.53 – Dissent] from the building of Dang district superintendent of police, Ahwa, has created panic among top national security agencies. Sources in police claim that the stolen device is a decoder of encrypted secret code language used by intelligence agencies to…
PH: PNP website trashed by hacker
Julie M. Aurelio reports: A website of one of the Philippine National Police’s support units was hacked by still unidentified persons on Sunday night, rendering the website virtually useless until Monday. The Police Security and Protection Group’s website was defaced by a hacker who identified himself as a certain “Leon HDZ,” posting a photograph of a…
It’s a Whole New Paranoid World
Delia Ephron writes: There is probably nothing about me that is not in the hands of hackers. First, JPMorgan Chase, where I have a bank account, got hacked, then Sony, where I have worked as a screenwriter, then Morgan Stanley, where I have a brokerage account, then Anthem Blue Cross, which has my medical information. Read…
Anonymous attacks NYPD union website
Rebecca Harshbarger reports: A cyberattack shut down a website for the NYPD captains union, targeting it with malware, union officials said. Hackers from the group Anonymous, which supported the Occupy Wall Street movement and recently started an online war with ISIS, corrupted the website of the Captain Endowment Association on Friday. […] Richter wrote that…