Imgur confirms breach, 1.7 million users affected

Popular image hosting website Imgur has announced on Friday that hackers stole usernames and passwords of 1.7 million of its users. The breach dates back to 2014, when Imgur still encrypted the stored passwords with the SHA-256 algorithm, which has since been found too weak to withstand brute forcing.

What Mr. Robot can teach us all about security

Mr. Robot has won the hearts and captured the minds of a lot of people around the globe by showing a captivating view of the information security world — and how vulnerable we all are to cyberattacks. When you see how main character Elliot and the hacker group fsociety hack whole corporations, never mind just…

Disqus, Forrester Research suffer data breach

Popular blog comment hosting service Disqus and market research company Forrester Research announced late on Friday that they’ve suffered a breach. While the latter was apparently limited to content made available to Forrester clients through Forrester.com, the former resulted in the theft of account data for some 17.5 million users.

Leaving employees to manage their own password security is a mistake

Despite the clear and present danger that weak passwords pose to organizations, many remain focused on implementing technology based on policy, not the user, to address the problem. How do you manage password security? More than half of IT executives surveyed rely on employees alone to monitor their own password behavior, subsequently leaving the company at risk,…

World Password Day: Make the Internet a more secure place

Identity theft is one of the world’s fastest growing crimes, but adding strong authentication to your password can prevent it. Today is World Password Day, and here are some of the comments Help Net Security received from the infosec community. This year’s World Password Day is particularly pertinent as it marks almost a year to…

Phishing attacks responsible for three-quarters of all malware

With phishing now widely used as a mechanism for distributing ransomware, a new NTT Security reveals that 77% of all detected ransomware globally was in four main sectors – business & professional services (28%), government (19%), health care (15%) and retail (15%). While technical attacks on the newest vulnerabilities tend to dominate the media, many…

6 Tips for Preventing Laptop Data Theft

Experts point to stronger passwords, full-disk encryption, and multi-factor authentication as ways to stop data theft in the event a laptop is lost or stolen.  Anybody can have their laptop stolen. It happened to Hillary Clinton’s campaign last fall, when three laptops were stolen from campaign workers in Philadelphia. In that case, the devices were…

These Were the Most Common Passwords Used in 2016

Although weak and commonly used passwords have long been one of the most used venues to compromise accounts, they remain at the top of the most popular passwords charts, a recent Keeper Security report reveals. Last year’s mega-breaches once again brought to the spotlight the long-lasting issue of weak passwords, but users remained deaf to…

12 tips for implementing secure business practices

Optiv Security shared a list of a dozen tips for implementing secure business practices during the 2016 holiday season. Security experts developed these recommendations to help security and IT teams better prepare their companies and employees to address the increase in cyber threats that occur during this time of year.