Stolen Passwords 272 Million Email Accounts Found

An American security company claims to have discovered the stolen usernames and passwords of 272 million email accounts. A large part relates to accounts of Russian mail service Mail.ru, let the company hold Security across news agency Reuters to know.

How the data is not stated precisely captured. According to Alex Holden Security Hold the stolen credentials were offered a forum for cyber criminals. He managed to get the data and verified. It turned out to be nearly 57 million Mail.ru accounts, 40 million Yahoo accounts, Microsoft 33 million accounts and nearly 24 million Gmail accounts and hundreds of thousands accounts of Chinese and German email providers.

Mail.ru, in response to the discovery launched an investigation to see which users are affected, to warn subsequently. A preliminary audit showed that did not work the leaked usernames and passwords.

UK Hospitals Receive 230,000 Euro Fine For Data Leak

A collective of UK hospitals has been fined more than 230,000 euros since it had placed the private information of staff inadvertently on its website. It was the national insurance number, date of birth, religion and sexual orientation of 6,500 employees.

The collective discovered the data breach after 10 months and had another 5 months to inform the affected employees. The information was provided voluntarily by the staff, so that collectively an annual overview of diversity and equality could publish within hospitals. The spreadsheets were found to contain hidden data simply became visible by double-clicking on a table. Because of the data breach, the UK data protection authority ICO now fined 185,000 pounds (the equivalent of more than 230,000 euros).

32 Zero-Day Vulnerabilities Announced At Black Hat Conference

For another two weeks and then starts the American edition of the Black Hat conference, one of the most important conferences in the field of IT security. This year especially defense against malware and mobile technologies popular topics, but there will also be all sorts of unknown vulnerabilities are demonstrated.

"We have 32 different zero-day vulnerabilities disclosed during the event," said Stevie Wylie, general director of the conference, compared to eWeek . "The zero days come from a variety of areas, including mobile and SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) systems." In addition, the conference for the first time a study ( pdf ) published among 460 security experts. The experts suggest that refined attacks directly against the organization are focused and phishing and social engineering are the main concerns. Furthermore, the experts most daily time spent on vulnerabilities that are introduced by their own application developers.

When it comes to expenditure are incidental data leaks that cause end users because they do not follow the policy as well as targeted attacks, the greatest costs. When asked what the weakest link in the enterprise security indicates 33% of the surveyed experts to end users who violate security policy and easily be misled by social engineering attacks. According to Black Hat, the survey shows that the current IT security model of enterprises should be reconsidered and that security professionals do not spend their time and money to make the issues they are most concerned about.