HACKING

The news comes nearly a year after disclosures from the Panama Papers shook the global political elite and triggered investigations into prominent figures worldwide.

The data of Tarte Cosmetics' customers was left publicly exposed via two unsecured MongoDB databases, which were later accessed by the Cru3lty ransomware gang.

The hackers reportedly had control over Coinhive's domain name for around six hours.

The botnet has now been christened "Reaper" and is said to be expanding at a rapid pace, using unpatched vulnerabilities to infect millions of devices.

The malware is capable of stealing victims' contacts, reading and sending SMS messages and locking out users from accessing their phones.

The London Bridge Plastic Surgery confirmed the hack and the data theft, adding that it is still working on determining what kind of data was compromised.

So far, the ongoing FBI investigation has resulted in three cases against defendants across the US.

NCSC head Ciaran Martin confirmed that "hostile" nation-state hackers had hit Northern Ireland infrastructure in "significant" attacks.

Experts from ESET, a Slovakian antivirus company, said this week (23 October) that both Google and the real Poloniex crypto exchange have been notified.

The Anonymous group is known to use distributed denial of service (DDoS) cyberattacks in order to overwhelm website servers with traffic and force them offline.

The two-page file, lifted from the conference's website, was created on 4 October and researchers from Cisco Talos said attacks peaked three days later.

The DHS and FBI said in a joint report that the threat actors are "actively pursuing their ultimate objectives over a long-term campaign".

Hackers infected the installers of the Eltima Player and Folx apps with the Proton malware, which in turn was downloaded by unsuspecting users.

Research suggested that the new botnet is evolving at a rapid pace, and could soon be weaponised to launch cyberattacks in the same fashion as "Mirai" last year.

The programme encourages researchers to scour for bugs in select popular apps created by Google as well as third-party developers,

The zero-day vulnerability, which was previously exploited by the BlackOasis group, was made public and patched on 16 October.

Malaysian technology website Lowyat reported that the files were offered for sale by an unknown user of its forums.

Don Meij insisted that the firm does not store credit card information on its systems and stressed: "No financial data was accessed in this incident."

The leaked records contained citizen ID numbers, names, genders, martial statuses, home ownership information, employment details and income data.

The hacker group has been active since 2014 and is particularly interested in naval industries, primarily focusing on targets in the US, Western Europe and the South China Sea.

Symantec researchers said these infected apps were downloaded between 600,000 and 2.6 million times.