Pertinent Articles From Around The Web Pertaining To Cyber Security

A security vulnerability affecting 16 companies worldwide, including Air Canada, the CN Tower, and the San Diego Zoo, has potentially revealed the unencrypted credit card data of hundreds of thousands of customers, according to a report by threat detection firm Wandera.

The vulnerability, which Wandera dubbed 'CardCrypt', comes after a failure of companies to effectively encrypt their customers' credit card data. The 16 global companies, including numerous airlines, failed to effectively encrypt traffic to the payment portion of their websites and apps.

A supercomputer at the Australian Government-based Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) is believed to have been breached by China. Multiple officials have confirmed the attack to Australia's ABC News.

Governments worldwide face routine attempted attacks on a daily basis, but this breach appears to be an exception. It has been described as 'massive'' with one unnamed Australian official directly placing blame saying, 'it's China'.

With the release of the Roku's new streaming player - which supports 4K - there have been many more leaks of hit TV shows from the Netflix 4K library. This is now drawing questions as to whether the Roku device is the weak link in the chain by not using High-Bandwidth Digital Copy Protection 2.2 (HDCP) - a mechanism that is believed to still be secure from ambitious pirates trying to leak content.

As for the leaks from the Amazon 4K library, the Amazon Fire TV could be what's responsible. The Fire TV uses the weaker HDCP 1.4b, and could be the reason for the leak of shows.

Earlier this month, an unknown hacker exfiltrated customer databases from Chinese toy maker, VTech. Amongst the data stolen were the records of 5 million parents and over 200,000 children.

Along with account data, such as user names and passwords, the toy maker also stored personal data including names, email addresses, physical addresses, and ip addresses of customers. Particularly troubling is that the identities of children can be matched with their respective parents using the data.

According to the statement issued by Jim Holthouser, Executive Vice President of Global Brands, 'unauthorized malware' was used to gain access to Hilton's point-of-sale systems resulting in the theft of payment card information of some of its guests. The attacks are said to have occurred between November 18 to December 5, 2014; and April 21 to July 27, 2015. Customers who used their cards at any of the Hilton Worldwide hotels - including its subsidiary brands, such as Waldorf Astoria, Conrad Hotels & Resorts, Double Tree, Embassy Suites, and others - during these periods have been recommended to monitor unusual activity.