Security

BlackBerry on Tuesday announced a new line of business to provide developers with a secure, cloud-based, mobile communications platform for texting, voice, video and file sharing.

Developers can insert these capabilities into their existing custom apps and services using the new BBM Enterprise SDK (software developer kit), BlackBerry said. The SDK will be sold as a per-user license on a subscription basis to developers, including those employed at enterprises, and to independent software vendors (ISVs).

In early June 2014, accountants at the Lumiere Place Casino in St. Louis noticed that several of their slot machines had—just for a couple of days—gone haywire. The government-approved software that powers such machines gives the house a fixed mathematical edge, so that casinos can be certain of how much they’ll earn over the long haul—say, 7.129 cents for every dollar played. But on June 2 and 3, a number of Lumiere’s machines had spit out far more money than they’d consumed, despite not awarding any major jackpots, an aberration known in industry parlance as a negative hold.

If your printer printed a “YOUR PRINTER HAS BEEN PWND’D” message from “stackoverflowin,” then it’s just one of more than 150,000 printers that have been pwned. Although the message likely referenced your printer being part of a botnet or “flaming botnet,” the hacker responsible says it’s not and that he is trying to raise awareness about the pitiful state of printer security.

One of the messages the hacker caused to print was:

Vulnerabilities in the Internet of Things can have odd results, as we witnessed last year when radio stations suddenly started playing archived clips from a furry podcast. More recently, unknown hackers have exploited the Barix IP streamers some stations use to syndicate content for another purpose: playing YG's song "FDT." According to the Associated Press, a South Carolina station ended up playing the song on a loop for 15 minutes Monday night, following incidents on small stations in other states.

Anonymous hackers have breached Freedom Hosting II, a popular Dark Web hosting provider, and have taken down 10,613 .onion sites.

Since all websites were interconnected by Freedom Hosting II's underlying infrastructure, all sites have been defaced with the same message.

HP, Lexmark and Dell printers could be hacked thanks to a 32-year-old flaw that allows an attacker to access and manipulate documents, steal passwords and shut down printers.

According to researchers at Ruhr University, around 20 models of printers are affected and these flaws are linked to common printing languages, such as PostScript and PJL.

Concerned about the role hackers and false news might have played in the United States election, the Dutch government announced on Wednesday that all ballots in next month’s elections would be counted by hand.

WordPress waited to disclose a REST API Endpoint bug that made sites using WordPress 4.7 and 4.7.1 vulnerable to content injection attacks in order to protect the sites while a security fix was rolled out in WordPress 4.7.2, according to a blog post published Wednesday by WordPress Core Contributor Aaron Campbell.

Sucuri security researcher Marc-Alexandre Montpas alerted the WordPress Security Team of the vulnerability on Jan. 20, who worked with Sucuri to coordinate the disclosure with patching efforts.

Many individuals rely on Jupyter Notebooks to learn new programming languages, build proof-of-concept tools and interactively analyze data. But what happens when security rigor is sacrificed in favor of standing up a notebook server as quickly as possible? Unfortunately, as you will learn, easily preventable security configurations are overlooked and serious security vulnerabilities are made available for attackers to exploit.

The Chrome browser extension for Cisco Systems WebEx communications and collaboration service was just updated to fix a vulnerability that leaves all 20 million users susceptible to drive-by attacks that can be carried out by just about any website they visit.