Month: January 2018

Russian authorities discovered a fraudulent scheme involving dozens of gas station employees, who installed malicious software programs on electronic gas pumps, to cheat customers. The scam skimmed 3 to 7 percent of every gallon sold into a separate tank, as it was being pumped. Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) arrested hacker Denis Zayev in Stavropol, Russia.

Read more about it here.

Meltdown and Spectre are the names of two serious security flaws that have recently been found within computer processors. They could allow hackers to steal sensitive data without the user knowing, one of them affecting computer chips made as far back as 1995.

Practically every computing device may be affected by Spectre. All modern processors, including those made by Intel, AMD and ARM, may be exposed.

Software vendors, including Microsoft, Apple and Google, are releasing software patches to fix the flaws. Such fixes typically mitigate the flaws by altering or disabling the use of speculative execution and cashing, causing performance degradation.

Read more about it here.

Intel, Arm and AMD processors are exposed to Spectre and Meltdown bugs. Intel will not recall its processors.

Read more about it here.

Security experts at Trend Micro have demonstrated that some models of Sonos and Bose speakers can be remotely accessed to play spooky sounds or to issue Alexa commands.

Read more about it here.

Malware present at some point of sale (POS) systems in stores across the US was used to extract credit card information throughout most of 2017.

Read more about it here.

Facebook now displays under the Settings menu the list of emails sent by Facebook. This allows users to validate the authenticity of emails allegedly sent to them by Facebook.

Read more about it here.