The mastermind behind a notorious botnet operating since 2011 has been arrested following an international law enforcement effort to bring an end to his online activities. 33-year-old Sergey Jaretz of Rechitsa, Belarus was arrested by local authorities Dec. 4 on behalf of a joint task-force of European Union law enforcement agencies, the U.S. Federal Bureau ...

Apple Inc. is reported to have acquired Pop Up Archive, an Oakland, California-based startup that offered an online platform of tools for organizing and searching digital spoken words. Neither company has confirmed or denied a deal has taken place, but Nieman Lab was the first to report the news. It said Apple’s response when asked for ...

Another day, another misconfigured database exposing customer data online. Today’s data breach involving 31 million records collected by Israeli emoji mobile keyboard maker AI.type. First spotted by the Kromtech Security Center, the data was found on a misconfigured MongoDB installation that AI.type had failed to make private and also had failed to set password protection for. The ...

PayPal Holdings Inc. has revealed that TIO Networks Inc., a financial services company that facilitates bill payments in offline locations it acquired earlier this year, was hacked and private data from 1.6 million customers was compromised. In a statement, PayPal said that its investigation had “identified evidence of unauthorized access to TIO’s network, including locations that ...

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has finally acted against dubious initial coin offerings by taking legal action against a company that raised $15 million from investors in August. In a statement, the SEC said that it had obtained an emergency asset freeze to halt trading by PlexCoin, an Ethereum blockchain-based token raise from a ...

The price of bitcoin recovered from its plunge Nov. 29 to hit yet-another new record high on Sunday as positive market news drove investors back into the market. Pushing near $12,000 for the first time, the price of bitcoin hit $11,830.13 at 3:20 p.m. EST before profit takers dropped the price back down to around ...

In an unexpected twist, cats may be the next big thing in cryptocurrency, thanks to a new game that uses Ethereum. Called Cryptokitties, the game allows players buy, sell and breed unique cartoon kittens. According to Bitcoinist, the object of the game is to acquire cartoon kittens, each with a specific set of attributes, and then try ...

In the latest twist on claims leveled against Russian security firm Kaspersky Labs, an employee of the U.S. National Security Agency has admitted to illegally taking classified data home on his personal computer. Nghia Hoang Pho, 67, of Ellicott City, Maryland, spent 10 years working for the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations unit, a unit tasked with hacking computer ...

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein is not a fan of bitcoin. On Thursday, he said he believed the cryptocurrency was a “vehicle for fraud” and his company has no interest in investing in it. Blankfein (pictured) made the comments as part of an interview on Bloomberg TV, noting that he doesn’t consider the ...

Florida-based credit repair agency National Credit Federation is the latest in a growing list of companies and organizations to expose private data online. This time,  cybersecurity company uncovered a huge amount of private data from the company on an unsecured Amazon Web Services S3 instance. Chris Vickery, director of cyber-risk research at UpGuard Inc. Thursday made the discovery, which ...