Hackers who compromise websites are also increasingly verifying themselves as the owners of those properties in Google's Search Console. Under certain circumstances this could allow them to remain undetected longer than they otherwise would be, researchers warn.

If the legitimate owners don't read the notifications and take immediate action, the attackers can actually remove them from the Search Console verification list by deleting their HTML verification files from the server. This will trigger no notifications to the real owners, according to Sucuri senior malware researcher Denis Sinegubko.

Check Point security researcher Kasif Dekel found that to exploit the vulnerability, an attacker simply needs to send a WhatsApp user a seemingly innocent vCard contact card, containing malicious code. Once opened in WhatsApp Web, the executable file in the contact card can run, further compromising computers by distributing malware including ransomware, bots, remote access tools (RATs), and other types of malicious code.

Google has been ordered by the Information Commissioner’s office to remove nine links to current news stories about older reports which themselves were removed from search results under the ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling.

Deputy commissioner David Smith said: “The European court ruling last year was clear that links prompted by searching on an individual’s name are subject to data protection rules. That means they shouldn’t include personal information that is no longer relevant.”

Researchers are still poring over the unusually large dump, but already they say it includes user names, first and last names, and hashed passwords for 33 million accounts, partial credit card data, street names, and phone numbers for huge numbers of users, records documenting 9.6 million transactions, and 36 million e-mail addresses.

Already, websites are popping up that allow anyone to enter an e-mail address and find out if it was included in the dump. It wouldn't be surprising for the same thing to be done for phone numbers and other data fields. This massive leak isn't likely to end well for huge numbers of people.

Netcraft, which collated the figures, reckons that 175 million websites are directly served from a Server 2003 computer.

Microsoft's out-of-range support costs a rumoured $600 a machine, so the potential cost for those who ignored the opportunity to get on a migration path in good time is getting huge, whatever they decide to do. µ

The number of people who log into Twitter at least once a month rose less than 3 percent from the previous quarter.

Shares plunged to a record low of $28.69 in the middle of the trading hours. At the end of day, shares had fallen 5.6 percent to $29.30 -- the lowest since May of last year.

"The bottom line for Twitter is that after nine years of its existence, my mother still doesn't understand what it means to 'hashtag' something," wrote Ben Schachter, an analyst at Macquarie Capital, in a note to investors. "But she does understand what it means to 'like' something," he added, referring to Facebook's ubiquitous feature.

ALM Chief Executive Noel Biderman confirmed the hack, and said the company was “working diligently and feverishly” to take down ALM’s intellectual property. Indeed, in the short span of 30 minutes between that brief interview and the publication of this story, several of the Impact Team’s Web links were no longer responding.

“Avid Life Media has been instructed to take Ashley Madison and Established Men offline permanently in all forms, or we will release all customer records, including profiles with all the customers’ secret sexual fantasies and matching credit card transactions, real names and addresses, and employee documents and emails. The other websites may stay online.”

"The JPEG committee investigates solutions to assure privacy and security when sharing photos on social networks, (stock) photography databases, etc. JPEG Privacy & Security will provide new functionality to JPEG encoded images such as ensuring privacy, maintaining data integrity, and protecting intellectual rights, while maintaining backwards and forward compatibility to existing JPEG legacy solutions."

What's interesting is that some are claiming this is based on this research paper that pitches such DRM for the purpose of protecting images from surveillance and such.

My boss and I were having a discussion about our users accessing the internet. He wants the users to be able to log in to the firewall to be able to access external websites that they are normally blocked from accessing. They would get a 45-minute window to do this, and then if they need more time, they need to re-login.

“The team has now concluded with high confidence that sensitive information, including the Social Security Numbers (SSNs) of 21.5 million individuals, was stolen from the background investigation databases,” OPM wrote in the statement.

In June, after the hack was first publicly acknowledged, the government said the breach exposed the personal information of approximately four million people—and the information stolen only included data such as Social Security numbers, birth dates and addresses of current and former federal workers.