News

Adobe, SAP, Intel, AMD, Android also show up with bouquet of fixes

Patch Tuesday  Happy Patch Tuesday for February, 2023, which falls on Valentine's Day.…

And growing abuse of cloud – because using hijacked Brazilian cable modems to down sites is so 2013

Dozens of companies over the weekend were hit by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, including the largest one yet recorded, or so Cloudflare says.…

Chocolate Factory's ad tech renovation is moving ahead, like it or not

Google on Tuesday began rolling out a beta test of its Privacy Sandbox software for a small portion of Android 13 devices to learn how its purportedly privacy-protecting ad tech actually performs.…

Happy Valentine's Day! Now don't get fooled

It sounds like the plot of a somewhat far-fetched romcom-slash-thriller Netflix series, maybe billed as You meets Your Place or Mine, dropping just in time for Valentine's Day.…

That's not what I like

Crooks have breached Pepsi Bottling Ventures' network and, after deploying info-stealing malware, made off with sensitive personal and financial information according to a notification sent to consumers.…

Blames 'third-party provider' as phishers drain Ethereum wallets

Domain registrar Namecheap blamed a "third-party provider" that sends its newsletters after customers complained of receiving phishing emails from Namecheap's system.…

Also: Russian wiper malware authors turn to data theft, plus this week's critical vulns

in brief  The notorious LockBit ransomware gang has taken credit for an attack on the Royal Mail – but a deadline it gave for payment has come and gone with nothing exposed to the web except the group's claims.…

Smart-alec worker found a way to avoid nasty, boring jobs – by doing what he was told

Who, Me?  Ah, gentle reader, welcome back once again to the comfortable backwater of The Register we call Who, Me? in which readers' tales of not-quite-rightness are immortalized for the ages.…

US Commerce Department can't just let red balloons go by

The US Department of Commerce added six more entities to its blacklist on Friday on grounds of national security after an errant Chinese surveillance balloon was shot down over the US last week.…

All that data coming soon to a darkweb crime forum near you?

Several California medical groups have sent security breach notification letters to more than three million patients alerting them that crooks may have stolen a ton of their sensitive health and personal information during a ransomware infection in December.…

Any act that sends so much as a ruble to seven named netizens now forbidden

The US and UK have sanctioned seven Russians for their alleged roles in disseminating Conti and Ryuk ransomware and the Trickbot banking trojan.…

State Dept already has one target, FBI is identifying sources of floating surveillance platform's components

The Chinese surveillance balloon that drifted across the US last week looks set to spark a new round of sanctions against Middle Kingdom tech firms.…

The usual suspects - Hikvision and Dahua - named as a risk to national security, prompting the usual denials

Australia's Defence Department removed all Chinese manufactured surveillance cameras after an audit detailed the number of Hikvision and Dahua devices installed in various government facilities.…

Don't trust your super-hot military boyfriend you've never met. He doesn't exist

As Valentine's Day approaches, if your offshore oil rig worker "boyfriend" – who looks like Bradley Cooper in his online pics and has hinted at proposing to you for months, but you've never met in real life – suddenly needs money for "hospital bills" … Just. Don't. Do. It.…

Phishing hooked internal documents, code, and some internal systems, but users' personal info safe

Colorful web forum Reddit has revealed it has suffered a security breach.…

Digital sleuths chop through crypto challenge in 'surreal' search

A team of codebreakers discovered – and then cracked – more than 50 secret letters written by Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots while she was imprisoned in England by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I. …

NIST weighs up algorithms for small devices – and an architecture for massive systems

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology wants to protect all devices great and small, and is getting closer to settling on next-gen cryptographic algorithms suitable for systems at both ends of that spectrum – the very great and the very small.…

Evil code hits more than 3,800 servers globally, according to the Feds

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has released a recovery script to help companies whose servers were scrambled in the recent ESXiArgs ransomware outbreak.…

Demand to display wallet full of coin facilitated mystery heist

Ahad Shams, the co-founder of Web3 metaverse gaming engine startup Webaverse, discovered in late November 2022 that someone had stolen $4 million of his cryptocurrency – during a real world interaction.…

Suomi sentence expected for shrink records theft

French police have arrested a 25-year-old Finnish man accused of hacking a psychotherapy clinic, stealing more than 22,000 patients' therapy notes, demanding ransom payments from them and also leaking this very private info on a Tor website.…