It was an audacious scheme: an attempted inside job at the office of a federal watchdog agency, where the cops, the authorities said, became the robbers.

Three employees in the inspector general’s office for the Department of Homeland Security stole a computer system that contained sensitive personal information of about 246,000 agency employees, according to three United States officials and a report sent to Congress last week. They planned to modify the office’s proprietary software for managing investigative and disciplinary cases so that they could market and sell it to other inspector general offices across the federal government.

The contents of a highly sensitive hard drive belonging to a division of the National Security Agency have been left online.

The virtual disk image contains over 100 gigabytes of data from an Army intelligence project, codenamed "Red Disk." The disk image belongs to the US Army's Intelligence and Security Command, known as INSCOM, a division of both the Army and the NSA. The disk image was left on an unlisted but public Amazon Web Services storage server, without a password, open for anyone to download. Unprotected storage buckets have become a recurring theme in recent data leaks and exposures. 

The FBI failed to notify scores of US officials that Russian hackers were trying to break into their personal Gmail accounts despite having evidence for at least a year, an investigation found.

The Associated Press dedicated two months and a small team of reporters to go through a hit list of targets of Fancy Bear, a Russian government-aligned cyberespionage group, that was provided by the cybersecurity firm Secureworks. Previous investigations based on the list had shown how Fancy Bear worked in close alignment with the Kremlin’s interests to steal tens of thousands of emails from the Democratic party. 

United States officials are charging an Iranian hacker in the theft of 1.5 terabytes of data from HBO in May, an attack that tormented network executives and included the release of several unaired programs and scripts.

Behzad Mesri, who went by the pseudonym “Skote Vahshat,” was charged with computer fraud, wire fraud, extortion and identity theft, according to an indictment unsealed Tuesday in United States District Court in Manhattan. But he remains in Iran, and officials acknowledged that it would be difficult to detain him. “He will forever be looking over his shoulder, and if he isn’t, he should be,” Joon H. Kim said at a news conference. 

There's no way around it – we are addicted to our smartphones. Smartphone addiction even has a name now; nomophobia, short for no-mobile-phone phobia.

We've all probably experienced the symptoms at one point: panicking when separated from our smartphone, not being able to focus at work or during conversations, and constantly checking phones for new notifications. The idea of being addicted to a screen is not a nice one, and according to a Deloitte survey, smartphone users have started to realize they might have a problem. Smartphone usage has been trending upwards since 2015, but for the first time Deloitte found that smartphone usage declined or plateaued in 2017.

Anyone with a free Amazon Web Services account could have looked at the hoard of information stored in the cloud by the U.S. Defense Department, according to Chris Vickery, a researcher at cybersecurity firm UpGuard who discovered the exposure.

Amazon Web Services is a cloud platform that individuals, businesses and the government use for things like storing data and boosting computing power. Amazon said on its website it is best practice to restrict access to information stored in the cloud to "people that absolutely need it." The military databases hold at least 1.8 billion internet posts scraped from social media, news sites, forums and other publicly available websites, Vickery told. 

The personal computer of an NSA worker who took government hacking tools and classified documents home with him was infected with a backdoor trojan, unrelated to these tools, that could have been used by criminal hackers to steal the US government files.

The Moscow-based antivirus firm, which has been accused of using its security software to improperly grab NSA hacking tools and classified documents from the NSA worker's home computer and provide them to the Russian government, says the worker had at least 120 other malicious files on his home computer.

Researchers are warning users about a wave of recent attacks targeting U.S. financial institutions that leverage a new banking Trojan dubbed IcedID.

The IcedID Trojan was spotted in September. They said the Trojan has several standout techniques and procedures, such as the ability to spread over a network and the ability to monitor a browser’s activity by setting up a local proxy for traffic tunneling. “At this time, the malware targets banks, payment card providers, mobile services providers, payroll, webmail and e-commerce sites in the U.S.,” researchers wrote in a report released Monday explaining the discovery. 

OnePlus, a major Chinese smartphone manufacturer, has gotten itself into a hell of a lot of security trouble lately, and now the situation is only getting worse.

Mobile security researcher Robert Baptiste, who goes by the pseudonym Elliot Alderson (a nod to the main character in the Mr. Robot series), discovered that OnePlus smartphones have been apparently shipping for years with a hidden backdoor. It makes it easy for a clever hacker with physical access to root a OnePlus phone with just a few lines of code. Alderson found an application on OnePlus devices intended for factory testing, and discovered it could be used to obtain “root access” to the phone. 

The U.S. International Trade Commission said on Tuesday it had launched an investigation into allegations of patent infringement by Apple Inc on various devices. The commission said in a statement the probe was based on a complaint by Aqua Connect Inc and Strategic Technology Partners of Orange, California.

The products at issue are certain Apple Mac computers, iPhones, iPads, iPods, and Apple TVs, it said. The investigation is based on a complaint filed by Aqua Connect, Inc., and Strategic Technology Partners, LLC, of Orange, CA, on October 10, 2017. The complaint alleges violations of section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930 in the importation into the US.