From a newly released GAO report: Federal systems face an evolving array of cyber-based threats. These threats can be unintentional—for example, from software coding errors or the actions of careless or poorly trained employees; or intentional—targeted or untargeted attacks from criminals, hackers, adversarial nations, terrorists, disgruntled employees or other organizational insiders, among others. These concerns…
Month: November 2015
FL: Audit finds Tampa put city workers at risk of ID theft
Christopher O’Donnell reports: The city broke federal law and put some workers at risk of identity theft by including their Social Security numbers on child support and other garnishment checks, a city audit found. The audit of the city’s Accounts Payable department showed Social Security numbers were printed on payment checks sent to banks, creditors…
UK: Plymouth boy, 15, charged over global cyber-attacks
BBC reports: A 15-year-old British boy has been charged over cyber-attacks on international websites and bomb hoaxes against US airlines, police have said. The boy, from Plymouth, is accused of offences related to service attacks on websites in Europe, North America, Africa and Asia. Charges against him also relate to bomb hoaxes placed with North…
Hackers Leak Brazilian Army’s Data for Foul Play in Cyber War Games
Carolina reports: Earlier this week the servers of Brazilian Army got hacked leading to private details of around 7,000 military officials getting stolen. Hackers were quick to publish the hacked private data, which included national insurance numbers and IDs/passwords used for accessing official military websites along with other details. The attack on its servers was…
#ParisAttacks — Anonymous declares War on Daesh: ‘We will Hunt you Down!’
Swati Khandelwal reports: Following the bloody terror attacks in Paris where over 130 people were killed, the hacktivist collective Anonymous has declared total war against the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL). Anonymous released a video message, posted in French, on YouTube Sunday announcing the beginning of #OpParis, a coordinated campaign to hunt down ISIS’s social media channels and every single…
Medical data, staff creds exposed as scores of apps bork the backend
Darren Pauli reports: And still we fail to learn: a quintet of researchers has found that the bad practice of writing keys into code persists among some of the world’s most popular Android and iOS applications. The researchers say the hard-coded credentials can be easily extracted to gain access and manipulate millions of sensitive individual…