You may already be aware of the news this morning that hackers are reportedly trading the email addresses and passwords belonging to thousands of British politicians, ambassadors and other top officials online. An investigation by The Times found two massive lists of stolen credentials were put up for sale or traded on Russian-speaking hacking sites, which included the log-in details of 1,000 British MPs and parliamentary staff, 7,000 police employees and over 1,000 Foreign Office officials.
Earlier today, The Times reported that hackers are trading email addresses and passwords belonging to thousands of British politicians, ambassadors and other top officials online. The newspaper conducted an investigation, which found two massive lists of stolen credentials were put up for sale or traded on Russian-speaking hacking sites, which included the log-in details of 1,000 British MPs and parliamentary staff, 7,000 police employees and over 1,000 Foreign Office officials.
There are few more unedifying sights than a bunch of neo-Marxists trying to promote mob rule by waiving shrouds.
According to a report in this morning’s Daily Mail, families are at risk from hackers taking advantage of security flaws in connected gadgets. A survey of 15 devices by the consumer group Which? found that eight were vulnerable to hacking via the internet, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connections.
News this morning that hackers are reportedly trading the email addresses and passwords belonging to thousands of British politicians, ambassadors and other top officials online;
Still a long way to go to equal fake news from the BBC and other Fake News Media, but cyberspace is beginning to catch up & may be balancing leftist propaganda
Majority also believe that they have personally been affected by fake news
London, UK, June 23, 2017 – DomainTools, the leader in domain name and DNS-based cyber threat intelligence, today announced the results of a survey which found that 91% of cyber security professionals believe that the UK’s political landscape has been manipulated by fake news. When asked if they thought that they had personally been affected by fake news, 61% agreed that they had. When asked who they felt is the most susceptible to fake news, the majority agreed that their children are most susceptible (28%) followed by their parents (26%), grandparents (25%) and colleagues and friends (21%).
It has been reported that Virgin Media has urged its Virgin Media has told 800,000 customers to change their passwords to protect against being hacked.
An investigation by Which? found that hackers could access the provider’s Super Hub 2 router, allowing access to users’ smart appliances.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40371373
It has been argued in the past that Virgin Media password advice is far from ideal- it constrains users to certain characters, whilst making it common/ public knowledge, how the passwords should be structured.
In response to this news, Mark James – Security Specialist for ESET has offered his insight:
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As we embrace more and more IOT and come to expect the ability to connect to anything and everything, no matter where we are, it stands to reason that companies want to make things as easy as possible for the user to embrace quickly and easily. This is where it can fall apart.
Security by design requires effort most of the time; when we get a nice, new shiny device all we want to do is plug it in and expect it to work! When we are presented with instructions to change passwords and even usernames for some, it may seem a little too much effort. But if we want to stay safe, we have to make these changes.
When items are shipped from the manufacturers, they have to use a default username and password to enable anyone to configure it. We must ensure we change that password immediately, and in the best cases we should be forced to change it before we continue.
A good thought process should be along the lines of “any password created by someone else, is a bad password”.
The consumer body Which? recently reported that over half of smart household gadgets they tested were vulnerable to cyberattack. Commenting on the news is Cesare Garlati, chief security strategist, prpl Foundation:
It is being reported that, beginning June 16 and continuing through today, players of Final Fantasy X1V have noticed that the game isn’t performing as expected. The publisher has announced that an influx of players is not the issue and, in fact, they have been experiencing DDoS attacks from “an anonymous third party”.
Following the news that the operation behind the UK government’s Cyber Essentials scheme has suffered a breach exposing the email addresses of registered consultancies, please see below for some thoughts from Leigh-Anne Galloway, Cyber Security Resilience Lead at Positive Technologies: