Cyber crooks have found a new way to ruin a person's day with ransomware. Traditionally most ransomware encrypts a victim's storage device and then demands a ransom in order to unlock the files. Some of the nastier versions will put a time limit on receiving payment before the ransomware starts permanently deleting...
Read more...
There are many different ways of hacking into a person's email account. Some are rather sophisticated and involve a lot of effort, while on the end of the spectrum a scheme known as phishing is one of the easiest methods—all you need is a cooperative victim with limited technical savvy. Hackers found both in John...
Read more...
So here we go again, another "massive and sustained Internet attack" made possible by a large collection of hacked Internet of Things (IoT) devices, things such as CCTV video cameras, digital video records, all sorts of smart home gadgets with a connection to the Internet, KrebsOnSecurity has determined. This is not...
Read more...
We wrote a couple of days ago about a huge treasure trove of alleged NSA-derived exploits that were hitting the market. That gold mine was accessed by a group calling itself Shadow Brokers, and it's been said that their source was Equation Group, which is believed to be an extension of the NSA.
At that time, there...
Read more...
With Nintendo's latest game - a mobile one, at that - the company has proven that there is still a lot of innovating to do in the market. While Pokemon GO is based on another title, Ingress, any game is going to have a greater chance of success when it features one of the most popular franchises ever. GO isn't just...
Read more...
If you're passionate about the topics of privacy, government surveillance, and security and also how they relate to the FBI and DOJ's fight to unlock that fateful San Bernardino iPhone, the whole situation likely pales in comparison to what communist countries like China force their citizens to tolerate. In an effort...
Read more...
A hot topic brought up often in the search for America's next president is the security and privacy of the country's citizens. Unfortunately, such matters rarely find themselves in the hands of politicians who truly understand what they're talking about, and we saw just such an example again Saturday night, during the...
Read more...
California has just landed itself a landmark victory in the fight for better protections of people's rights, and given what it entails, all we can do is hope that the state becomes an example that all others will want to follow.
In the past, law enforcement hasn't had much of a stumbling block when it's come to...
Read more...
Where computer security is concerned, it almost seems like unauthorized access can be granted via an unlimited number of ways. While computer security in the home is obviously very important, having good defenses in the enterprise market is paramount. In some cases, slipping up could result in the loss of millions of...
Read more...
Here we go again. Researchers for Tangible Security have discovered three major vulnerabilities which strike at least three different Seagate enclosures - the Seagate Wireless Plus Mobile Storage, Seagate Wireless Mobile Storage, and LaCie FUEL - equipped with firmware 2.2.0.005 or 2.3.0.014. As these things go, other...
Read more...
Karma's a dirty little devil, a fact that as many as 37 million unfaithful online users may find that out the hard way. That's because the hackers who infiltrated Ashely Madison, a dating website for married folk to practice infidelity under the tagline "Life is short. Have an affair," published a cache of personal...
Read more...
Maybe someday the Chinese government will take a page from O.J. Simpson and write a book titled, "If I Did It: Confessions of a Hacker." After all, China is clinging to the innocence card just as adamantly as Simpson, never mind any evidence to the contrary. In fact, not only is the Chinese government saying it's not...
Read more...
If the state of the US government's security wasn't appalling before, it sure should be now. Earlier this month, we reported on a breach of government systems that saw the information of four million current and prior government employees get taken by a third-party -- a third-party that was highly believed to be...
Read more...
The parade of banks, insurance companies and retailers that have suffered data breaches has caused many people to store their passwords with sites like LastPass. The security company creates a unique password for each of the user’s logins and provides access to those passwords via a single, master password.
Now, LastPass is admitting that
Read more...
Security firms and anti-malware providers sure do have their work cut out for them, a fact that seems to get emphasized every day. As attackers become more creative, researchers have to dig deep in order to understand how malware manages to hide itself so well. It used to be that static scanners would be suitable...
Read more...
We reported a couple of weeks ago that GitHub was hit with a massive DDoS attack, and given the projects that were targeted; it was widely assumed that China was behind the attack. Now, there's even more evidence of that, and it appears that a brand-new weapon was used to carry the attack out.
According to a report...
Read more...
Slack, the fast-growing startup previously known as Tiny Speck, has rolled out an optional two-factor authentication feature in response to a recent hacker attack. The company confirmed there was unauthorized access to its database containing user profile information, and though it was quick to respond and made...
Read more...
It's bad enough when you're in possession of a database containing 80 million customer records and it gets hacked. But what's even worse than that is when you fail to encrypt all that data. Such is the unfortunate situation facing Anthem, the second largest healthcare provider in the U.S., and its tens of millions of...
Read more...
It should strike no one as a surprise at this point that the US and China have a bit of a strained relationship when it comes to trust. Both have accused each other of cyber offenses, and likewise, neither has much faith in the products it sources from the other. Post-Snowden, the situation has only become...
Read more...
Last January, some six or so months after Edward Snowden exposed much of the NSA's shady behavior to the world, a smartphone was announced that promised unparalleled levels of security. Called BlackPhone, we followed-up a month later to provide a price, $629, and some specs. Quad-core, 2GB of RAM, 16GB storage... all standard fare for a good
Read more...
Earlier this month, it was discovered that China was using man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks against Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird email clients, as well as smartphone apps that use IMAP and SMTP protocols. Or did it? A spokesman for the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) claims the allegations that...
Read more...
It's starting to look like the Lizard Squad saga is slowly reaching its conclusion, as UK police recently arrested another person with direct ties to the group. That development, however, isn't too interesting today; everything now coming out as a result is quite revealing.
Security researcher Brian Krebs has been...
Read more...
