Hacking attacks against sales terminals have risen by nearly a third last year, and the US is still leading the way in being insecure. Incidents affecting sales tills and payment systems increased to 31 per cent in 2016, according to research by security firm Trustwave, while incidents affecting e-commerce environments fell to …

A UK hacker who stole £100,000 from his bank after spotting a loophole in its systems has been jailed for 16 months. Unemployed James Ejankowski, 24, of Bridlington, squandered his ill-gotten gains by splurging on a BMW and a Range Rover, and getting his face tattooed (as shown in a story in the Teeside Evening Gazette here). …

A UK-based computer hacker has admitted stealing hundreds of usernames and email addresses from a US military communications system. Sean Caffrey, 25, of Sutton Coldfield in the West Midlands, broke in and pinched the ranks, usernames and email addresses of more than 800 users of a satellite communications system and of about …

Security researchers have developed a free decryption tool for victims of the ‪Jaff‬ ransomware, meaning they can regain access to files without paying crooks. The utility – developed by boffins at Kaspersky Lab – works on all variants released to date. Of course there is still the possibility that the criminals behind Jaff …

Security researchers have discovered a ransomware variant that targets Macs rather than Windows PCs. Although technically inferior to most current ransomware targeting Windows, it still encrypts or prevents access to victim's files, thereby causing real damage, according to researchers at Fortinet. MacRansom uses symmetric …

Analysis Opposition is growing over demands that digital forensics labs comply with ISO 17025 – an international checklist for laboratory testing. Essentially, the UK government and Brit police chiefs want computer forensics labs serving Blighty's criminal justice system to be ISO 17025 compliant by October 2017. That means IT experts …

Russia's control of cybercrime groups that have come to play a part in its espionage activity is crumbling, according to Cybereason. The security intelligence outfit reached this conclusion after reviewing the latest tactics and procedures associated with high-profile cyber-espionage pops blamed on the Kremlin. Russia has made …

Ross Ulbricht has lost his bid to set aside his life sentence for selling illegal drugs through the now defunct underground website Silk Road. Ulbricht, who operated Silk Road from 2011 through 2013 under the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in 2015 on charges of …

Thousands of private photos have been leaked by cybercriminals following the hack of a Lithuanian cosmetic surgery clinic. A hacking group, using the nickname "Tsar Team", leaked images it claims came from the Grozio Chirurgija clinic servers. The group spaffed the data after targeted health facility's customers failed to meet …

The supposed "Pirates hack" was only ever a hoax, according to Disney chief exec Bob Iger. Earlier this month the Disney's boss said that hackers were threatening one of its movies unless it paid a ransom. This film was widely assumed to be Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. Hackers had supposedly obtained the …

The ‪WannaCry‬pt extortion notes were most likely written by Chinese-speaking authors, according to linguistic analysis. WannaCry samples analysed by security outfit Flashpoint contained language configuration files with translated ransom messages for 28 languages. All but three of these messages were put together using Google …

A strain of adblocker-aware malvertising is responsible for a range of scams, exploits and general skulduggery. RoughTed can deliver a variety of payloads including exploit kits and malware. Hackers are leveraging fingerprinting and adblocker-bypassing techniques in a bid to ensure that marks are served content from RoughTed- …

Ransomware saw a more than eight-fold (752 per cent) increase as a mode of attack in 2016, according to Trend Micro. The infosec firm estimates file-scrambling malware families such as Locky and Goldeneye raked in $1 billion in 2016. 2016 was the year when ransomware ruled, and this danger has been maintained by recent …

A ransomware variant, dubbed Uiwix, that abuses the same vulnerability as WannaCrypt has turned out to be something of a damp squib. Uiwix omits the kill switch domain that was instrumental in shutting down the spread of WannaCrypt while retaining its self-replicating abilities, Danish security firm Heimdal Security warned on …

Security researchers are exploring the theory that the WannaCrypt ransomware might be the work of an infamous North Korean government-backed hacking crew. The crumb-trail-sniffing began on Monday after Neel Mehta, a security researcher from Google, posted an artefact on Twitter potentially pointing at a connection between the …

The Necurs botnet has been harnessed to fling a new strain of ransomware dubbed "Jaff". Jaff spreads in a similar way to the infamous file-encrypting malware Locky and even uses the same payment site template, but is nonetheless a different monster. Attached to dangerous emails is an infectious PDF containing an embedded DOCM …

Researchers have discovered yet another IoT botnet. Persirai targets more than a thousand different internet protocol camera models. Researchers at Trend Micro warn that 120,000 web-connected cameras are vulnerable to the malware. Consumers would, in most cases, be unaware that their devices are even exposed to the internet …

Identity crimes remain among the greatest threats to UK businesses online. The offences made up three in five (60 per cent) of all fraud recorded by Cifas, the UK's leading fraud prevention service. Cifas' annual report, published Wednesday, collates statistics from 325,092 instances of fraud recorded in 2016. These internal …