The US State Department on Friday announced that it is pulling all non-essential staff and their families out of its embassy in Cuba following reports of a secret weapon being deployed against employees there. In a communiqué, the department said that the embassy would be reduced to an emergency skeleton staff until future …

Beleaguered web host 123-Reg has suffered a "huge scale" distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack to its data centre – knocking the Brit outfit's website offline and a number of users' services. The attack began this morning and is still ongoing but no performance-related issues have been reported since the traffic was …

Swiss defence contractor RUAG and the country's GovCERT have revealed the details of a 2014 network breach in which attackers got access to a stunning 23 GB of data. RUAG's business covers defence, aerospace (including drones), and ammunition technology, making it a very attractive target for espionage. The breach was only …

Updated HSBC customers were once again locked out of online banking this morning, following an apparent DDoS attack on the bank. The bank tweeted: "HSBC UK internet banking was attacked this morning. We successfully defended our systems. It added: "We are working hard to restore services, and normal service is now being resumed. We …

Shares in TalkTalk climbed more than 12 per cent, following the company's first half fiscal report to the City this morning. The budget telco's boss Dido Harding was bullish about TalkTalk's response to the attack on its systems last month. She claimed during a conference call with journalists and analysts that some customers …

Budget ISP TalkTalk confirmed this morning that it would be hit with a bill of up to £35m following the attack on its systems last month. The security breach affected fewer customers than previously feared, TalkTalk’s chief Dido Harding claimed. It had initially warned that its entire four-million-strong subscriber base could …

Encrypted email provider ProtonMail is still being hit by a DDoS attack from what appears to be a nation state, as well as a secondary and separate lower-level assault from an identified assailant. However, the service is now operating normally, it seems. Switzerland-based ProtonMail offers an encrypted webmail system able to …

Scandi finance house Swedbank has been hit by a DDoS attack, which has taken down access to online banking via its website. Customers can access their online accounts through a specific URL but are unable to transact with the bank through its website. Mobile applications and payments continue to function, Swedbank spokesman …

TalkTalk has once again attempted to downplay the seriousness of the attack on its systems by claiming on Friday morning that only four per cent of its customers – nearly 157,000 people – were affected by the security breach. The budget ISP said that bank account numbers and sort codes of 15,656 of its subscribers had been …

A 60-year-old man has been arrested in Japan following a violent encounter with a robot on Sunday, with the mechanoid coming off worse. Named as Kiichi Ishikawa of the city of Yokosuka by the Kanagawa Prefectural Police, the Butlerian jihadi was described as "drunken" by the Japan Times, who reported on the latest incident in …

Web hosting provider Servint has been hit by a network outage, reportedly due to a DDoS attack. In a tweet, the company said: "We are aware of an issue affecting a portion of our network. We are attempting to diagnose it and will update as we get information." Email provider SMTP2GO was one of the company's customers to be …

Heads are set to roll at the Office of Personnel Management as director Katherine Archuleta continues to receive a grilling from Senate committees, who are beginning to realise that the country's entire intelligence workforce has been utterly pwned, probably by a hostile nation. Archuleta, alongside OPM's Chief Information …

This is not a good way to come out of deep sleep. A US man was awoken from his drunken stupor by the pain of his girlfriend sinking her fangs into his gentleman’s sausage and bludgeoning him with her laptop. The incident took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma on 19 February, following a boozy session and subsequent argument between …

Popular mobile and online note app Evernote is recovering from a distributed denial of service attack that took its service offline for hours last night. The firm was hit by the DDoS attack from around 10.45 BST last night, leaving folks unable to access their notes in the cloud or sync their files from one device to another …

The Bank of England today announced it plans to penetrate Blighty’s banks to test the security of their critical computer systems. Speaking to the British Bankers’ Association, the BoE's exec director of resolution, Andrew Gracie launched CBEST [PDF], a new defence-testing programme that mimics crims who attack crucial …

New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) has deployed perhaps the ultimate security device - an RJ 45 plug's locking tab - to protect its 34 Tflops FitzRoy supercomputer after its security was breached. The locking tab was employed after the $NZ12.7 million machine, installed in 2011, was …

Crowd-funding site Kickstarter is the latest high-profile Internet property to call on users to reset their passwords, after announcing that an attacker had made off with their account records. However, the site is at pains to emphasise that attackers won't have access to credit card data. In this announcement, the company's …

NATO ministers have agreed to step up efforts to protect members' cyber networks, but are still unsure whether or not to step in and sort out individual hacks. Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in a press conference after the first defence ministers' meeting devoted to cyber issues yesterday that attacks were " …