Items tagged with security
Houston, we have a security issue (you thought we were going to say "problem," didn't you?). Actually, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has several security issues, according to an audit by the Office of Inspector General. Among other things, an examination of JPL's network security controls found that the...
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The National Security Agency (NSA) has a program in place called Upstream that taps directly into the Internet backbone to search traffic. The agency has claimed in the past that the warrantless searches of email are allowed under Section 702 enacted as part of the FISA Amendments Act. The agency made changes in 2017...
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You may have only recently updated your Firefox browser to build 67.0, but guess what? You should mash the update button once gain. The latest version, build 67.0.3, contains a fix for a major security vulnerability that is being actively exploited in the wild, according to Mozilla. Leaving Firefox unpatched is not a...
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With good intentions, Samsung took to Twitter to remind smart TV owners to scan their televisions for malware, and the Internet reacted about as you would expect. Snarky and indignant replies followed, and of course so did the jokes. And with good reason—after all, Samsung just made one heck of an argument to avoid...
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Security researchers at Bitdefender have updated a decryption tool to deal with the latest version of GandCrab, a popular form of ransomware that its authors sold to clients on the dark web for a supposedly enormous profit. The decryption tool is free, and could potentially save a GandCrab victim from a major...
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When it comes to disclosing vulnerabilities, the Project Zero team at Google generally sticks to a hard-and-fast deadline, giving companies 90 days to issue a patch before going public with its findings. There are some rare exceptions, but for the most part, Project Zero sticks to that time frame. As such, Project...
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Sometimes it feels as though nary a day goes by without someone sounding the alarm on a new security vulnerability. More recently, there has been a lot of hoopla over side-channel exploits, such as Spectre and Meltdown, and various other variants. Here is another one to add to your mental catalog of...
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Netgear on Tuesday announced its new Cybersecurity AC2300 Wi-Fi Router (RS400) with special software baked inside to keep networks safe from online threats. Called Netgear Armor, it is essentially an implementation of Bitdefender Total Security 2019, though there are some key differences between what's integrated in...
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Earlier this week, the United States National Security Agency (NSA) urged Windows administrators to patch older versions of Windows to protect against BlueKeep, a vulnerability in the Remote Desktop (RDP) protocol that an attacker could exploit to conduct a denial of service (DoS) attack. Now just a couple of days...
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When we think of the National Security Agency (NSA) and cybersecurity, we think of the intelligence agency’s grab bag of security exploits that it uses to enhance its own spying efforts. But one particular remote code execution exploit, which has been dubbed BlueKeep, has the NSA actually warning Windows users to...
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It is said that no good deed goes unpunished, but on the flips side, there are bad deeds that get rewarded. So it goes for the hackers responsible for GandCrab, a popular form of ransomware that was sold to clients on the dark web, who are now retiring and going legitimate with their earnings.
The hackers claim...
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Several technology firms have written an open letter to the GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), a UK intelligence and security organization, in response to the agency's proposed eavesdropping measure. If implemented, law enforcement would be able to spy on encrypted messages, such as those that are sent...
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Hacks are happening all the time with some giving information on user accounts like the Flipboard hack we talked about recently. Other hacks are much grander in scale, like the attack against the city of Baltimore that resulted in most of the cities systems being locked out. Another significant hack has happened, and...
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Flipboard is a news aggregator app, and the company has announced that it fell victim to hacks. The hacks potentially exposed user account information and left that information where it could be copied for nine months. The exposed user details included Flipboard user names, encrypted passwords, and email...
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An auction for a netbook model from 2008 that is running Windows XP SP3 has fetched more than $1.3 million from its final bid, with the buyer owning quite possibly the most expensive laptop in the world. Why did it sell for so much? It contains half a dozen malware samples that have collectively caused over $95...
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Back in 2017, the National Security Agency (NSA) lost control of one of its hacking tools called EternalBlue. Since the hacking tool slipped into the world, it has been picked up by hackers in North Korea, Russia, and China, among other places. The tool has been used to allegedly create billions of dollars in damage...
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When we last talked about about Snap back in March, it was rumored that the company would be launching a gaming platform in April. However, a new report of a much more negative nature is making the rounds that claims Snap employees have been using an internal tool to spy on users. The tool in question is called...
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Biometric security measures are improving all the time, though they are not infallible. This is demonstrated on the recently launched OnePlus 7 Pro. It has a fingerprint sensor that is embedded in the full-front display, and with a little bit of glue and a few minutes of time, it can be easily thwarted. Well, sort...
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Smartphone security is becoming more sophisticated by the day. Fingerprint scanning and facial recognition schemes are starting to supplant PIN codes and passwords, but have you wondered what the next frontier might be? One possible avenue is behavioral biometrics, and a company called UnifyID is leading the...
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Google has announced that it has begun to notify administrators about how some passwords were inappropriately stored on its servers. Google says that its policy is to store user passwords with cryptographic hashes that mask passwords to ensure their security. However, Google recently notified a subset of its...
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Google Titan Security Keys are supposed to be the best way to secure your online accounts, and come with two-factor authentication. Google has stated that it uses the Titan Security Keys internally. Recently the search giant announced that it had discovered a misconfiguration in the Bluetooth Low Energy version of the...
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For the few of you who are still clinging to Windows XP, there is a new security update available. That's right, Microsoft has issued a rare patch for the defunct operating system, along with a few other versions of Windows, to protect against a 'wormable' exploit that could spread from infected PC to infected PC in a...
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