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"Russian state-linked hackers have targeted the WhatsApp accounts of government ministers and officials around the world with emails inviting them to join user groups on the messaging app. The WhatsApp tactic marks a new approach by a hacking unit called Star Blizzard. Britain's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has linked Star Blizzard to Russia's domestic spy agency, the FSB, and has accused it of seeking to "undermine trust in politics in the UK and likeminded states"."

Who said you could not bring the internet down?

"The significance of the attack on Krebs is that it looks as though many of the attacks on him came from large numbers of enslaved devices - routers, cameras, networked TVs and the like. "Someone has a botnet with capabilities we haven't seen before," says Martin McKeay, Akamai's senior security expert. The DDoS arms race has just moved up a gear."

"This person or group, who go by the names BestBuy and Popopret, recently spammed an ad to folks on Jabber, an instant messaging service. They offered to perform a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on whomever their client(s) wanted, and they backed up their offer by claiming to wield the ability to perform some of the strongest DDoS attacks ever seen. Recent events in the history of the internet show us that these kind of attacks - if these hackers indeed have the power they claim - can wreak internet havoc by blocking user access to a range of some of the web's most popular destinations."

"The US government is researching technology that it hopes will turn soldiers into cyborgs, allowing them to connect directly to computers. The US military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) has unveiled a research programme called Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) which aims to develop an implantable neural interface, connecting humans directly to computers."

"West Midlands Trains emailed about 2,500 employees with a message saying its managing director, Julian Edwards, wanted to thank them for their hard work over the past year under Covid-19. The email said they would get a one-off payment as a thank you after "huge strain was placed upon a large number of our workforce". However, those who clicked through on the link to read Edwards' thank you were instead emailed back with a message telling them it was a company-designed "phishing simulation test" and there was to be no bonus. It warned: "This was a test designed by our IT team to entice you to click the link and used both the promise of thanks and financial reward.""

Sounds a bit extreme just to make sure no one can log on to your laptop or smartphone, but a team of researchers from Stanford and Northwestern universities as well as SRI International is nonetheless experimenting at the computer-, cognitive- and neuroscience intersection to combat identity theft and shore up cyber security-by taking advantage of the human brain's innate abilities to learn and recognize patterns.

"Personal information of more than 243 million Brazilians was exposed for more than six months thanks to weakly encoded credentials stored in the source code of the Brazilian Ministry of Health's website. The data leak exposed both living and deceased Brazilians' medical records to possible unauthorized access. The incident was the second reported by Brazilian publication Estadão and among several others recently affecting South America's largest nation's healthcare system."

"Hultquist noted that cyberwarfare evens the battlefield between Iran and the US. "That's why they choose an asymmetric battleground," he said. "We might have this massive advantage with a very sophisticated ability, but we also have this very sophisticated society that makes us very vulnerable to computer attacks.""

"Zoom is not encrypting calls for free accounts with end to end encryption so they can provide law enforcement and the Federal Bureau of Investigation with content from those calls. As protesters demonstrate in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, law enforcement has deployed a wide range of surveillance tools to monitor and track protesters－including facial recognition software and contact tracing technology. They are working to get information from every source possible to disrupt and even arrest people involved with the protests."

"The Purdue researchers have created Electro-Quasistatic Human Body Communication (EQS-HBC) which uses low-frequency, carrier-less broadband transmission, and so keeps the signal almost entirely within the human body. That means data from pacemakers and other implantable medical devices would only be readable a handful of centimetres outside the wearer."

"Increasing numbers of implantable medical devices are now gaining internet connectivity, giving doctors the ability to monitor patients health remotely, and even update the devices to tweak a treatment plan. Unfortunately, that flexibility offers a way for hackers to hijack that hardware, and even potentially make changes to the way the devices work. While so far no attacks have been successful, proof-of-concept attacks have been available for years"

"This is called a supply-chain attack, because it targets a supplier to an organization rather than an organization itself - and can affect all of a supplier's customers. It's an increasingly common way to attack networks. Other examples of this sort of attack include fake apps in the Google Play store, and hacked replacement screens for your smartphone."

"However, Dimon is not alone in his belief that having foundational tech knowledge is still a lucrative career path. In fact, over 250 chief executives-the likes of Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Airbnb's Brian Chesky, and Salesforce's Marc Benioff-came together early this year to sign a letter demanding all students have access to computer science and AI education. "A basic foundation in computer science and AI is crucial for helping every student thrive in a technology-driven world. Without it, they risk falling behind," wrote the letter sent to lawmakers.  The push came on the heels of research from the University of Maryland that found that high school students who take a computer science class will have 8% greater earnings on average by the time they've secured their first job."