Over 25 million accounts associated with forums hosted by Russian internet giant Mail.ru have been stolen by hackers. Two hackers carried out attacks on three separate game-related forums in July and August. One forum alone accounted for almost half of the breached data – a little under 13 million records; the other two forums make up over 12 million records.
The databases were stolen in early August, according to breach notification site LeakedSource.com, which obtained a copy of the databases. The hackers' names aren't known, but they used known SQL injection vulnerabilities found in older vBulletin forum software to get access to the databases.
Read moreIn a rare public accounting of its mass surveillance program, the United States Postal Service reported that it approved nearly 50,000 requests last year from law enforcement agencies and its own internal inspection unit to secretly monitor the mail of Americans for use in criminal and national security investigations.
The number of requests, contained in a 2014 audit of the surveillance program by the Postal Service’s inspector general, shows that the surveillance program is more extensive than previously disclosed and that oversight protecting Americans from potential abuses is lax. The audit, which was reported on earlier by Politico, found that in many cases the Postal Service approved requests to monitor an individual’s mail.
Read moreNot all accounts are created equal. It’s only natural that you would care less about an ESPN Fantasy Football account than you would care about your online banking or PayPal account.
Anyone who spends even a little time thinking about security is careful to use a strong password and proceed with caution when accessing a service related to personal finance. However, a lot of users are also relatively careless about their primary webmail account, which often serves as a master key to all other accounts. Think about it: whenever you set up nearly any online account, you’re prompted to enter a primary webmail account. There are a number of reasons for this.
Read moreThe problem with encrypted email is that it’s hard to use – if it weren’t, everyone would be using it. So rather than mucking around with encryption keys, they’re using services like Gmail, which leave their messages open for reading if an intelligence agency is secretly tapping the provider’s fiber, or if law enforcement comes knocking at the front door.
This is why the Dark Mail project, which ended its Kickstarter campaign comfortably past the $196,608 goal late Wednesday, is so intriguing. It represents the evolution of two notable secure email schemes that shut themselves down in the wake of the Snowden disclosures, Lavabit and as such it’s got some hefty talent running the show.
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110 Reykjavik, Iceland