The Pentagon on Thursday confirmed that there was a hacking attempt this past weekend against an online financial services portal that Citigroup manages for Defense Department credit card holders. The confirmation comes a day after Citigroup told CNBC that a "malicious actor" attempted to gain access to information for Pentagon-linked credit card accounts.

For a moment, it seemed the hackers had slipped up and exposed their identities. It was the summer of 2013, and European investigators were looking into an unprecedented breach of Belgium’s telecommunications infrastructure. They believed they were on the trail of the people responsible. But it would soon become clear that they were chasing ghosts – fake names that had been invented by British spies.

The United States is "vulnerable" to cybersecurity attacks and need to step up their defense mechanisms, the co-founder of the computer security firm CrowdStrike told CNBC Saturday. Recent cyberattacks, including NotPetya last June, have been devastating to American companies, causing them hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. Other attacks, such as the cybersecurity breach at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in 2015, have reportedly given key information to governments like China's that can be used to blackmail American citizens working with sensitive intelligence.

Intel has already started looking for other Spectre-like flaws, but it won't be able to move on from the Spectre/Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities anytime soon. A team of security researchers from NVIDIA and Princeton University have discovered new ways to exploit Meltdown and Spectre outside of those idenfitied in the past. The researchers developed a tool to explore how else cyber criminals could take advantage of the CPU flaws and found new techniques that could be used to extract sensitive info like passwords from devices.

Are we prepared for a nightmare scenario?

Police have apologised after giving infected memory sticks as prizes in a government-run cyber-security quiz. Taiwan's national police agency said 54 of the flash drives it gave out at an event highlighting a government's cybercrime crackdown contained malware. The virus, which can steal personal data and has been linked to fraud, was added inadvertently, it said.

Tech companies are still working overtime on patching two critical vulnerabilities in computer chips that were revealed this week. The flaws, dubbed “Meltdown” and “Spectre,” could let hackers get hold of passwords, encryption keys, and other sensitive information from a computer’s core memory via malicious apps running on devices. How many chips are affected? The number is something of a moving target.

Called Meltdown, the first and most urgent flaw affects nearly microprocessors made by Intel. The second, Spectre, affects most other chips.

Resolutions to shake laziness, get organized and gain control of finances are ritually adopted each January and abandoned soon after. But there’s one common bad habit that consumers and billion-dollar businesses alike should have quit long ago and can’t afford to carry into 2018: the use of weak website security questions.

Reality Winner grew up in a carefully kept manufactured home on the edge of a cattle farm 100 miles north of the Mexican border in a majority-Latino town where her mother, Billie, still lives. From the back porch, a carpet of green meets the horizon, and when a neighbor shoots a gun for target practice, a half-dozen local dogs run under the trailer to hide. Billie worked for Child Protective Services, and in Ricardo, Texas, the steady income made her daughters feel well-off; the fact that they had a dishwasher seemed evidence of elevated social standing.

Researchers at the German IT Security company SySS GmbH successfully fooled the Windows 10 facial recognition system by using a printed photo of the user's face. Their spoofing efforts were published on the cybersecurity site Seclists on Dec. 18. The cybersecurity experts bypassed Windows Hello — which is Microsoft's password-free security software — on both a Dell and Microsoft laptop running different versions of Windows 10, which is cause for concern for anyone using this feature to log into their account.

The White House will blame North Korea for a May cyber attack that paralyzed businesses and government entities, sources told Reuters

A previously undetected group of Russian-language hackers silently stole nearly $10 million from at least 18 mostly U.S. and Russian banks in recent years by targeting interbank transfer systems, a Moscow-based security firm said on Monday.

The head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency warned Sunday that China allegedly is using social networks to try to cultivate lawmakers and other officials as sources. Hans-Georg Maassen said his agency, known by its German acronym BfV, believes more than 10,000 Germans have been targeted by Chinese intelligence agents posing as consultants, headhunters or researchers, primarily on the social networking site LinkedIn.

Cryptocurrencies have been on a wild ride. The premier digital currency, Bitcoin, crossed $17,000 in value Thursday before plunging back to $14,000. Others like it are gaining in popularity as prices climb to meteoric heights. While these new digital currencies are helping some pioneering investors gain quick wealth, federal authorities are warning about their potential for fraud.

Conflicting accounts have emerged about a security breach involving the ai.type add-on keyboard for iOS and Android, with researchers claiming that 31 million people's data has been compromised -- with a user's contacts also potentially included in the leak.

Britain’s cybersecurity agency has told government departments not to use antivirus software from Moscow-based firm Kaspersky Lab amid concerns about Russian snooping. Ciaran Martin, head of the National Cyber Security Centre, said “Russia is acting against the U.K.’s national interest in cyberspace.” In a letter dated Friday to civil service chiefs, he said Russia seeks “to target U.K. central government and the U.K.’s critical national infrastructure.” He advised that “a Russia-based provider should never be used” for systems that deal with issues related to national security.

Hundreds of the world’s top websites routinely track a user’s every keystroke, mouse movement and input into a web form – even before it’s submitted or later abandoned, according to the results of a study from researchers at Princeton University.

The submarine communications cables that carry internet traffic around the world are vulnerable to physical and virtual attacks. A patchwork of international law protects them from intentional damage.

$117,000 worth of Bitcoin was reportedly stolen from an Austrian man’s laptop in Vienna after he logged onto a public WIFI network at the restaurant he was eating in.