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It’s almost a cliche to talk about how often breaches occur—in 2015 alone, we’ve seen high-profile breaches from everyone from Anthem, the popular work collaboration tool Slack, and even the federal government thanks to the recent US Office of Personnel Management attack.

The Anonymous internet hacking network declared war on the Islamic State group in a Youtube video Monday, vowing vengeance for attacks in Paris that left 129 dead and hundreds injured. "Anonymous everywhere in the world is going to hunt you down," a hooded figure in black, wearing the group's signature Guy Fawkes mask said in French.

Google plans to ramp up security at its free email service by letting users know when messages arrive via unencrypted connections that could be prone to snooping or tampering. "These warnings will begin to roll out in the coming months," Elie Bursztein and Nicolas Lidzborski of the Gmail security team said in a blog post this week.

Hacking back, whether as part of an active defense strategy or a threat intelligence effort, is a controversial practice that many security firms and experts officially advise against. However, retribution is in some cases part of active defense offerings and researchers do occasionally compromise the infrastructure of threat groups to unmask their activities.

The Tor Project, the organization behind the Tor anonymity network, claims the FBI paid Carnegie Mellon University “at least $1 million” to help the agency deanonymize users suspected of conducting criminal activities.

In my role as Managing Principal at Cigital, I spend most of my week talking with information security professionals at a wide variety of organizations. In discussing all of the issues facing security organizations, one issue stands above them all—talent. Never have I seen such a shortage of talent in the security industry as I do today.

Misty-eyed old-timers are mourning the passing of one of the world’s most elegant encryption algorithms. RC4 was designed by Ron Rivest in the late 1980s. Initially, RC4 was a proprietary trade secret of RSA Security. Perhaps due to the algorithm’s simplicity (you can keep it in your head), it leaked out into the Internet in the 1990s where it became the de facto TLS bulk encryption protocol for over a decade.

A point-of-sale (PoS) malware that went largely undetected for the past several years has been analyzed by researchers at Trustwave.Dubbed by the security firm “Cherry Picker,” the threat has been around since at least 2011, but it managed to stay under the radar thanks to its sophisticated functionality and use in highly targeted attacks.

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