BetaNews Staff

Malware compromises Swift system -- patch available

Malware magnifier

The Swift (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) system has apparently fallen victim to the same sophisticated hacking scheme that was used to disrupt the Bangladesh central bank last month.

The cyberattack in Bangladesh resulted in a loss of $951 million from the central bank's account at the Federal Reserve in New York and it now seems likely, thanks to new research from BAE systems, that Swift was also compromised during the attack.

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Companies invest more in DDoS protection

Pretty much every company out there has been, or will be a target of a DDoS attack. A new report by real-time information services provider Neustar, entitled The Threatscape Widens: DDoS Aggression and the Evolution of IoT Risks, released this month, says it’s no longer the question of "if" or "when" a company will be DDoSed -- it’s how often and how long will it last.

According to the report, 73 percent of companies were attacked in 2015, with 82 percent of those attacked suffering multiple attacks. Out of that number, 45 percent said they were attacked six times, or more. In EMEA, 47 percent of companies were attacked at least five times.

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Why ATMs are easy to hack

ATM keypad

Security researchers claim ATM machines are usually not that difficult for hackers to penetrate. Once they’re inside, they can steal money, or banking details from unsuspecting victims.

Now, researchers from Kaspersky Lab have investigated what makes ATMs such an easy target for hackers, and came to two conclusions: both software and hardware are easy to access and temper with.

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EE plans to cover the whole of the UK with 4G

Mobile operator EE said it will cover the entire UK (well, 95 percent of it, at least) with 4G connectivity by 2020. It also said it will shut down its customer call centers in India and create 600 new jobs in the UK and Ireland.

The announcement comes after EE landed a contract with the Government, under which it will replace the Airwave radio network and eliminate blinds spots, or 'not-spots' in connectivity, The Telegraph reported recently.

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How firms can fight back against ransomware attacks

Ransomware eye

There is no denying that ransomware attacks are a very real threat for businesses. Given the ever-growing value of data and the importance of business continuity, organizations that have fallen victim to such attacks either face a period of downtime or they pay out in order to retrieve their data to resume business as normal.

Headline-grabbing examples, such those affecting the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, or Lincolnshire County Council, are no doubt only the tip of the iceberg. How many others are giving in to ransomware demands without revealing they ever had a problem in the first place?

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Commercial notebook shipments return to growth

Commercial notebook shipments have returned to growth in the first quarter of 2016, new figures by market analysts IDC say. New form factors, guided by the ever increasing desire for mobility, aided by the new Windows 10 operating system and the Skylake processors were key drivers for this growth.

HP was the biggest winner of the new change, with Dell also outperforming the market average, IDC’s report says. Asus, Apple and Fujitsu posted some strong results, as well.

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Chip-enabled cards lead to a decrease in fraudulent transactions in US

Bank card security

Credit and debit cards with embedded microchips have finally begun to become widely available in the US and, according to Visa, they have already prevented a great deal of fraud with some large merchants seeing an 18 percent decrease in counterfeit transactions.

The company noted that 25 merchants had suffered heavily from fraud in 2014. Five of them decided to begin processing credit and debit cards equipped with EMV (Europay, MasterCard and Visa) technology and this led to an 18.3 percent decrease in fraud. Another five of those merchants did not have the necessary equipment to utilize chip-enabled cards and as a result they saw a 11.4 percent increase in fraudulent transactions.

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Nearly half of EU businesses don't know where their data's located

According to a survey by the cloud hosting firm UKFast, nearly half of businesses are clueless as to where their data is located.

To come to its findings, the company surveyed over 300 IT decision makers in EU businesses, with 47 percent of them unaware of where their personal and company data was hosted.

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More apps and websites leak credit card data on enterprise handsets

In its latest quarterly Mobile Data Report, Wandera has revealed a significant rise in apps leaking credit card data on enterprise mobile devices.

The company, which specializes in mobile data security and management, compiled the report by analyzing the data usage trends and traffic patterns across its global network of enterprise mobile devices. Between Q4 2015 and Q1 2016, there has been a 17 percent increase in apps and mobile websites leaking credit card data.

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Merchants are not security savvy

security padlock

More than a third (38.5 percent) of merchants don’t even know what type of risks new technologies such as mCommerce bring. They most likely wouldn’t recognize a fraud threat even if they were right in the middle of it.

Those are the conclusions written in the new 2016 Mobile Payments & Fraud Survey, released by Kount. The figures are quite a surprise, knowing that mobile fraud increased by 81 percent between 2011 and 2015.

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Google no longer lists its own site as 'partially dangerous'

According to Google’s online transparency report, Google.com had been considered a "partially dangerous" website.

In the report under the Safe Browsing section, the company listed its own website as one that could be dangerous to its visitors followed by a list of site safety details along with testing details.

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More UK adults taking online courses

Adults in the UK are turning to online learning platforms in order to stay competitive in their fields and to learn new skills, despite their increasingly busy schedules.

Coursera, which offers online courses from some of the top universities worldwide, has noticed that the number of new users registering for its educational platform has increased by 50 percent over the course of the past 12 months.

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Free Wi-Fi hotspots are a major security threat for businesses

Public wi-fi

Free Wi-Fi hotspots are the biggest security threat for mobile workers, according to new reports.

The recently released iPass Mobile Security Report says that 62 per cent of organizations are banning their mobile workers from using free Wi-Fi hotspots, with another 20 percent planning on doing the same in the future.

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AI platform better predicts cyber attacks thanks to human experts

AI

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have collaborated alongside the machine learning startup PatternEx to demonstrate how an artificial intelligence platform that makes use of continuous input from human experts would be able to predict cyber attacks better than the systems that exist today.

CSAIL and PatternEx are calling their new AI platform AI² due to how it combines the intuition of analysts with artificial intelligence.

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Migrating Oracle apps to the cloud

Cloud access

With companies of all sizes across the globe waking up to the benefits of moving some or all Oracle applications to the cloud, the cloud is rapidly becoming a star in many IT strategies of organizations. The benefits include the reduced need for up-front capital investment in order to accelerate return on investment, as well as gaining greater business insight and an excellent user experience.

The reality of today’s cloud technology is now matching -- or even exceeding -- the hype of a few years ago. However, some organizations are still cautious about moving business-critical applications to the cloud, based on perceived risks that are often overstated and based on outdated concerns.

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