Exclusive: German Police Raid OmniRAT Developer and Seize Digital Assets

The German police yesterday raided the house of the developer of OmniRAT and seized his laptop, computer and mobile phones probably as part of an investigation into a recent cyber attack, a source told The Hacker News.

OmniRAT made headlines in November 2015 when its developer launched it as a legitimate remote administration tool for IT experts and companies to manage their devices with explicit permissions.

Available between $25 and $100, OmniRAT quickly became one of the most popular remote  administration tools, allowing users to monitor Android, Windows, Linux, and Mac devices remotely and access every available information on them.

Hit by Ransomware Attack, Florida City Agrees to Pay Hackers $600,000

MIAMI — The leaders of Riviera Beach, Fla., looking weary, met quietly this week for an extraordinary vote to pay nearly $600,000 in ransom to hackers who paralyzed the city’s computer systems.

Riviera Beach, a small city of about 35,000 people just north of West Palm Beach, became the latest government to be crippled by ransomware attacks that have successfully extorted municipalities and forced them to dig into public coffers to restore their networks. A similar breach recently cost Baltimore $18 million to repair damages.

Cybersecurity giant Symantec plays down unreported breach of test data

The American cybersecurity giant Symantec has downplayed a data breach that allowed a hacker to access passwords and a purported list of its clients, including large Australian companies and government agencies.

The list extracted in the February incident, seen by Guardian Australia, suggests that all major federal government departments were among the targets of a hacker who also claimed to be responsible for Medicare data being available for sale on the dark web.

Traveler, License Plate Images Breached in Cyber Attack: CBP

U.S. Customs and Border Protection said that as of Monday no traveler or license plate image data accessed during a May 31 cyber attack has appeared on the dark web or internet.

According to CBP, a subcontractor transferred copies of traveler and license plate images to their company network which was subsequently breached.

We asked a cyber security expert to rate hacking gameplay

The concept of hacking gets bandied about a lot in games, even if it’s as simple as “press X to hack.” The pipe-swapping challenge in Bioshock and controller-vibrating word-scrambles in Batman: Arkham Knight provide a nice break in otherwise combat-heavy gameplay. Even a simple matching game can provide a nice change of pace.

While the hacking mechanics aren’t really meant to replicate the experience of actually hacking, we couldn’t help but wonder — do any of them get it right anyway?

We talked to Russell Brandom, cyber security expert and policy editor at The Verge, to learn the real-deal on hacking gameplay. From the circuit-board meddling in Mass Effect 2 to the automatic hacking app used by Miles Morales in Spider-man on PS4, we’ve got the details on which games manage to capture some of the hacking experience.