Chinese agencies and diplomatic missions have been targeted by hackers through their virtual private network (VPN) servers in a coordinated cyber espionage campaign, at a time when many governments and global organisations are more vulnerable than ever to security breaches due to remote working arrangements amid the pandemic, according to a report by a leading Chinese cybersecurity provider.

The FBI found Eric Marques by breaking the famed anonymity service Tor, and officials won’t reveal if a vulnerability was used. That has activists and lawyers concerned.

Over the past five years, ransomware has emerged as a vexing menace that has shut down factories, hospitals, and local municipalities and school districts around the world. In recent months, researchers have caught ransomware doing something that's potentially more sinister: intentionally tampering with industrial control systems that dams, electric grids, and gas refineries rely on to keep equipment running safely.

Its CEO claims that the data collection was legal.

Canada’s biggest provider of specialty laboratory testing services said it paid hackers an undisclosed amount for the return of personal data they stole belonging to as many as 15 million customers.

Cybercriminals are zeroing in on the managed service providers that handle computer systems for local governments and medical clinics.

The most sweeping takedown yet of so-called BEC scammers involved arrests in nearly a dozen countries.

Joint private-law enforcement efforts shuts down two-year-old Retadup malware operation for good.

A prolific hacker who carried out phishing scams against hundreds of companies worldwide has been ordered to pay back more than $1.1 million (over £922,000) worth of cryptocurrencies to his victims. Grant West, a 27-year-old resident of Kent, England, targeted several well-known companies around the world since 2015 to obtain the financial data of tens of thousands of customers and then sold that data on underground forums in exchange for Bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies.

A rash of supply chain attacks hitting open source software over the past year shows few signs of abating, following the discovery this week of two separate backdoors slipped into a dozen libraries downloaded by hundreds of thousands of server administrators. The first backdoor to come to light was in Webmin, a Web-based administration tool with more than 1 million installations. Sometime around April of last year, according to Webmin developer Jamie Cameron, someone compromised the server used to develop new versions of the program.

There’s a new hacking group on the radar targeting telecommunications and oil and gas companies across Africa and the Middle East. Industrial security company Dragos, which discovered the group, calls it “Hexane,” but remains largely tight-lipped on its activities. The security company said Thursday, however, that the group’s activity has ramped up in recent months amid heightened tensions in the region since the group first emerged a year ago.

A man who posted a Facebook message threatening to kill "as many girls as I see" in retaliation for years of romantic rejection was sentenced Thursday to up to five years in prison. Judge Christine Johnson's decision to keep Christopher W. Cleary, 27, of Denver, behind bars in Utah went against a recommendation from Cleary's attorney and prosecutors to sentence him to probation so he could be returned to Colorado to serve prison time there for probation violations.

On 26 March, the European commission published a recommendation designed to ensure the security of Europe’s 5G networks. You could be forgiven for having missed it, given that it was announced in what could hardly have been described as a “quiet EU news period”. However, the proposals are far-reaching and reflect the urgent need for coordinated action as we fast approach a technological tipping point of potentially profound significance.

A student who made hundreds of thousands of pounds blackmailing pornography website users with cyber attacks has been jailed. Zain Qaiser from Barking, London, used his programming skills to scam visitors to pornography sites around the world. Investigators have discovered about £700,000 of his profits - but his network may have made more than £4m. Qaiser, 24, was jailed for more than six years at Kingston Crown Court.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks may now cost the UK economy up to £1bn each year, representing a serious financial burden to businesses. A DDoS attack is when a network is flooded with more traffic than it can handle, meaning that it cannot be used. These attacks are often carried out using botnets, vast networks of internet-connected devices infected with malware.

In the world of digital thievery, a business model pivot is apparently underway. Over the past year cybercriminals have shifted their focus from ransomware attacks to so-called cryptojacking. That’s the marquee finding out of a new threat report published by IBM this week: Instances of the former money-making scheme were down 45% in 2018, while occurrences of the latter surged 450% in the same timespan, per IBM’s data.

North Korean hackers who have targeted American and European businesses for 18 months kept up their attacks last week even as President Trump was meeting with North Korea’s leader in Hanoi. The attacks, which include efforts to hack into banks, utilities and oil and gas companies, began in 2017, according to researchers at the cybersecurity company McAfee, a time when tensions between North Korea and the United States were flaring.

A batch of 127 million records stolen in data breaches affecting eight companies was put up for sale on the Dream Market marketplace by a seller who goes by the name of "gnosticplayers" and asking the equivalent of $14,500 in bitcoin for the entire collection.

The 'VF' now stands for 'virtually f*cked'

Tomi Masters was a 23-year-old from Indiana who moved to California with dreams of making it big in the cannabis business. Then she met a hacker who introduced her to a dark new world of digital manipulation, suspicion, paranoia, and fear — one that swallowed her alive and left her floating in a river in the Philippines.