Weekly News Roundup

Too busy working all week to keep up with the most interesting stories coming out of the technology and security industries? Below are our recommendations for a roundup of the top stories happening now that you need to know.

Equifax data breach affected 2.4 million more consumers

The 2017 Equifax data breach has expanded again, with the company announcing last week that another 2.4 million U.S. consumers had their information stolen. Read more…

Massive Coin-Mining Attempt Targets Nearly Half a Million PCs

Microsoft has averted a massive and widespread campaign that would have seen tens of thousands of machines impacted. The software giant reported that on March 6, "Windows Defender AV blocked more than 80,000 instances of several sophisticated Trojans that exhibited advanced cross-process injection techniques, persistence mechanisms and evasion methods." Read more…

DDoS Record Broken Again as Memcached Attack Hits 1.7 Tbps

Days after a massive 1.35 Tbps DDoS attack against GitHub, an even larger attack reported at 1.7 Tbps by Netscout Arbor emerges to become the largest DDoS yet. Read more…

Code for massive 'Memcrashed' DDoS attack made public

You, too, can now attempt a record-setting denial-of-service attack, as the tools used to launch the attacks were publicly posted to GitHub this week. Proof-of-concept code by Twitter user @037 combined with a list of 17,000 IP addresses of vulnerable memcached servers allows anyone to send forged UDP packets to memcached servers obtained from the Shodan.io computer search engine. Read more…

Weekly News Roundup

Too busy working all week to keep up with the most interesting stories coming out of the technology and security industries? Below are our recommendations for a roundup of the top stories happening now that you need to know.

23,000 HTTPS certificates axed after CEO emails private keys

A major dust-up on an Internet discussion forum is touching off troubling questions about the security of some browser-trusted HTTPS certificates when it revealed the CEO of a certificate reseller emailed a partner the sensitive private keys for 23,000 TLS certificates. Read more…

Equifax Discloses 2.4 Million More Mega-Breach Victims

Equifax says it identified 2.4 million U.S. consumers whose names and snippets of their driver's license numbers were stolen, adding to what is one of the largest and most sensitive data breaches on record. Read more…

Big banks want to weaken the internet’s underlying security protocol

The tech and financial industries are butting heads over the latter’s push to intentionally weaken a security protocol that underlies how the public securely accesses the vast majority of the internet. Critics are charging that the financial industry is pushing for a weakness in the new version of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, all for the sake of avoiding the time, effort and resources needed to adapt to the new standard. Read more…

Another massive DDoS internet blackout could be coming your way

A massive internet blackout similar to the Dyn DNS outage in 2016 could easily happen again, despite relatively low-cost countermeasures, according to a new study. The DDoS attack on Dyn took many major web sites offline for most of a day, including Twitter, PayPal, Reddit, Amazon, and Netflix. Millions of compromised IoT devices, belonging to the Mirai botnet, flooded Dyn's DNS service with up to 1.2 TBps of bogus traffic, making it impossible to respond to genuine DNS requests for their customers' websites. Read more…