CYBERSECURITY

The botnet has now been christened "Reaper" and is said to be expanding at a rapid pace, using unpatched vulnerabilities to infect millions of devices.

According to Group-IB, a cybersecurity firm, the virus now spreading is dubbed "BadRabbit" and is a form of ransomware that locks down machines and demands bitcoin.

The malware is capable of stealing victims' contacts, reading and sending SMS messages and locking out users from accessing their phones.

The London Bridge Plastic Surgery confirmed the hack and the data theft, adding that it is still working on determining what kind of data was compromised.

So far, the ongoing FBI investigation has resulted in three cases against defendants across the US.

NCSC head Ciaran Martin confirmed that "hostile" nation-state hackers had hit Northern Ireland infrastructure in "significant" attacks.

Experts from ESET, a Slovakian antivirus company, said this week (23 October) that both Google and the real Poloniex crypto exchange have been notified.

The Anonymous group is known to use distributed denial of service (DDoS) cyberattacks in order to overwhelm website servers with traffic and force them offline.

The two-page file, lifted from the conference's website, was created on 4 October and researchers from Cisco Talos said attacks peaked three days later.

The DHS and FBI said in a joint report that the threat actors are "actively pursuing their ultimate objectives over a long-term campaign".

Hackers infected the installers of the Eltima Player and Folx apps with the Proton malware, which in turn was downloaded by unsuspecting users.

Pompeo said "the world has moved" and pledged that the CIA will now refine how it works to combat "non-state threats" and "state intelligence adversaries."

Research suggested that the new botnet is evolving at a rapid pace, and could soon be weaponised to launch cyberattacks in the same fashion as "Mirai" last year.

The programme encourages researchers to scour for bugs in select popular apps created by Google as well as third-party developers,

"According to our intelligence services, the Russian government has made a project of turning Americans against each other," Bush said.

The zero-day vulnerability, which was previously exploited by the BlackOasis group, was made public and patched on 16 October.

Malaysian technology website Lowyat reported that the files were offered for sale by an unknown user of its forums.

Don Meij insisted that the firm does not store credit card information on its systems and stressed: "No financial data was accessed in this incident."

The leaked records contained citizen ID numbers, names, genders, martial statuses, home ownership information, employment details and income data.

The hacker group has been active since 2014 and is particularly interested in naval industries, primarily focusing on targets in the US, Western Europe and the South China Sea.

Ad buyers can choose the demography, what apps they want to cover, and the location that they want their ads to appear in.

Symantec researchers said these infected apps were downloaded between 600,000 and 2.6 million times.

Hackers have now reportedly launched a new site called ATMjackpot that sells a modified version of CutletMaker, complete with video tutorials on how to successfully exploit it.

A researcher has posted video of the Lovense sex toy being sent commands via his computer after what he says began as a 'joke' with another researcher.

The 27GB-sized cache was titled "MasterDeeds" and contained millions of records. The leaked records reportedly date back to the late 1990s.

Norwegian Consumer Council (NCC) released a report this week detailing the issues after testing a number of the devices: the Gator 2, Tinitell, Viksfjord and Xplora.

According to reports, the hermit kingdom's hacking unit has swelled to 6,000-people strong - conducting operations even as the country's internet remains weak.

The newer version of the remote access trojan (RAT) has been updated to run on modern operating systems and 64-bit platforms.

British spy agencies have been accused of collecting personal, social media, travel, medical and related data for years, unchecked and without oversight.