The islands of Åland are an important tax hack : Although Åland is part of the Republic of Finland, it has its own autonomous parliament. In areas where Åland has its own legislation, the group of islands essentially operates as an independent nation. This allows Scandinavians to avoid the notoriously …
Enlarge / This is not what a hacker looks like. Except on hacker cosplay night. (credit: Getty Images | Bill Hinton ) Microsoft has been tracking a threat group that stands out for its ability to cash in from data theft hacks that use broad social engineering attacks, painstaking research, and occasional …
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images ) Identity and authentication management provider Okta said hackers managed to view private customer information after gaining access to credentials to its customer support management system. “The threat actor was able to view files uploaded by certain Okta customers as part of recent support cases,” Okta …
Interesting New York Times article about high-school students hacking the grading system. What’s not helping? The policies many school districts are adopting that make it nearly impossible for low-performing students to fail—they have a grading floor under them, they know it, and that allows them to game …
Turns out pumps at gas stations are controlled via Bluetooth, and that the connections are insecure. No details in the article, but it seems that it’s easy to take control of the pump and have it dispense gas without requiring payment. It’s a complicated crime to monetize …
Company says it believes about 193,000 customers are affected by the breach, which it spotted in early September Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast Pizza Hut’s Australian operations have been hit …
Enlarge (credit: Wired staff; Getty Images) For state-sponsored hacking operations, unpatched vulnerabilities are valuable ammunition. Intelligence agencies and militaries seize on hackable bugs when they're revealed—exploiting them to carry out their campaigns of espionage or cyberwar—or spend millions to dig up new ones or to buy them …
Company says it is investigating the potential exposure of referral letters, patient names, contact details and Medicare numbers Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast Ten years worth of pathology referral letters may have been exposed in a cybersecurity incident affecting the Victorian …
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) An unknown hacker gained administrative control of Sourcegraph, an AI-driven service used by developers at Uber, Reddit, Dropbox, and other companies, and used it to provide free access to resources that normally would have required payment. In the process, the hacker(s) may have accessed …
A Brazilian spyware app vendor was hacked by activists: In an undated note seen by TechCrunch, the unnamed hackers described how they found and exploited several security vulnerabilities that allowed them to compromise WebDetetive’s servers and access its user databases. By exploiting other flaws in the spyware maker …
Enlarge (credit: Steve McDowell / Agefotostock ) In late May, researchers drove out a team of China state hackers who over the previous seven months had exploited a critical vulnerability that gave them backdoors into the networks of a who’s who of sensitive organizations. Barracuda, the security vendor whose Email …
Enlarge / Viktor Zhora from Ukraine’s information protection service, says cyber has become a major component of hybrid warfare. (credit: Dragonflypd.com/Black Hat) Viktor Zhora, the public face of Ukraine’s success against Russian cyberattacks, received a hero’s welcome earlier this month on stage at Black Hat …
This article talks about new Mexican laws about food labeling, and the lengths to which food manufacturers are going to ensure that they are not effective. There are the typical high-pressure lobbying tactics and lawsuits. But there’s also examples of companies hacking the laws: Companies like Coca-Cola and …
The UK Electoral Commission discovered last year that it was hacked the year before. That’s fourteen months between the hack and the discovery. It doesn’t know who was behind the hack. We worked with external security experts and the National Cyber Security Centre to investigate and secure …
The NSA discovered the intrusion in 2020—we don’t know how—and alerted the Japanese. The Washington Post has the story : The hackers had deep, persistent access and appeared to be after anything they could get their hands on—plans, capabilities, assessments of military shortcomings, according to three …
Deputy PM says technology may aid faster government decisions – but warns of massive hacking risks Artificial intelligence could have a more significant impact on Britain than the Industrial Revolution, the deputy prime minister has said, but warned it could be used by hackers to access sensitive information from the …
Data from Electoral Commission breach could allow rogue actors to create AI-generated messages in effort to manipulate elections Data accessed in the Electoral Commission hack could help state-backed actors target voters with AI-generated disinformation, experts have warned. The UK elections watchdog revealed on Tuesday that a hostile cyber-attack had …
Russia named as likely culprit in cyber-attack on election watchdog, while police service accidentally publishes staff details The UK election watchdog and Northern Ireland’s police service both announced serious data breaches on Tuesday, in the latest example of the vulnerability of personal details to hacks and human error …
Names and addresses of 40 million registered voters were accessible as far back as 2021 after cyber-attack Confidence in the UK’s electoral regulator has been thrown into question after it emerged a hostile cyber-attack accessing the data of 40 million voters went undetected for a year and the …
Electoral Commission hack is reminder of importance of protecting democratic system where it counts It turns out that while Conservative ministers were spending hours of parliamentary time in 2021-22 introducing requirements for voters to produce ID at polling stations – to protect elections against a threat most experts believed was …
A bunch of networks, including US Government networks, have been hacked by the Chinese. The hackers used forged authentication tokens to access user email, using a stolen Microsoft Azure account consumer signing key. Congress wants answers. The phrase “ negligent security practices ” is being tossed about—and with good reason …
Enlarge (credit: Jose A. Bernat Bacete ) Travel rewards programs like those offered by airlines and hotels tout the specific perks of joining their club over others. Under the hood, though, the digital infrastructure for many of these programs—including Delta SkyMiles, United MileagePlus, Hilton Honors, and Marriott Bonvoy—is …
The Washington Post is reporting on a hack to fool automatic resume sorting programs: putting text in a white font. The idea is that the programs rely primarily on simple pattern matching, and the trick is to copy a list of relevant keywords—or the published job description—into …
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) A US senator is calling on the Justice Department to hold Microsoft responsible for “negligent cybersecurity practices” that enabled Chinese espionage hackers to steal hundreds of thousands of emails from cloud customers, including officials in the US Departments of State and Commerce. “Holding Microsoft responsible …
Shadow minister says leak of ‘sensitive’ information after research into the Optus and Medibank hacks was ‘deeply ironic’ Follow our Australia news live blog for the latest updates Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast The home affairs department exposed the personal information …