Items tagged with security
Digital assistants have become a part of everyday life for many people and are supposed to make interactions with technology easier and seamless. Unfortunately, they can also be used against us in some situations. Underscoring this point, McAfee discovered a vulnerability in Cortana that could allow an attacker to...
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Cisco, the world's largest networking company in the world, has published additional details in regards to VPNFilter, a nasty piece of malware that was discovered to have infected half a million consumer network devices scattered across 54 countries last month. The company's latest findings indicate that VPNFilter is...
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Have you ever seen a pair of deer that are locked in horns with one another from butting heads in battle? That pretty much depicts Apple and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the ongoing fight over encryption, and whether the FBI should be granted backdoor access into devices. Apple has persistently contended...
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Until recently, a remote code execution vulnerability in Steam sat unnoticed by Valve for at least a decade, leaving millions of users at risk of attack. Luckily for all involved, it seems that malicious actors were not privy to the security bug either. Valve has since released a patch that partially addresses the...
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Cyber thieves may have stolen personal data of 90,000 people from two of the largest banks in Canada, including Bank of Montreal and Imperial Bank of Commerce. The banks are in the process of verifying the theft after the supposed culprits notified the financial institutions over the weekend that they were in...
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Security researchers from the University of Michigan and Zhejiang University in China have published a paper on an acoustic attack vector that could crash a mechanical hard drive, leading to damage for both the hardware and software. The attack does not require fancy equipment, either—an attacker could use regular...
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It's not often that the US Justice Department or FBI pleads with the public to do something, so when this happens, it's worth paying attention. This past week, the agency managed to thwart a botnet called VPNFilter by deactivating a domain that would have sent further instructions to routers belonging to ordinary folk...
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The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice dealt a blow to a sophisticated Russian botnet that security researchers referred to as VPNFilter. They did it by seizing a key domain used to perpetuate the attacks. In doing so, the agencies effectively disrupted a malicious effort that was...
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Computer users around the world are still reeling from the Spectre flaws that affected many modern ARM and x86-64 CPUs, and earlier this month we learned that there was another Spectre-style vulnerability that could affect processors from Intel, AMD and ARM. Intel and Microsoft have now stepped up and officially...
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An app designed to help parents spy on monitor their teenager's mobile phone activities has come under additional scrutiny for leaking account information of tens of thousands of parents and children.
The app is called TeenSafe and it allows parents to look over their child's shoulder, at least as it pertains to...
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New Spectre flaws have been revealed by the former head of Intel's advanced thread team, Yuriy Bulygin. This is a man who knows what he's doing, so his opinions and findings are not to be treated as fly-by-night like some others. Through his new security agency, Eclypsium (a neat name, it must be said), Bulygin posts...
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Facebook has another small crisis on its hands, and users are panicking all over social media. Over the past 24 hours, Android users have been receiving prompts from the Facebook app requesting superuser privileges.
For those that might not be familiar with Android's permissions system, superuser access would...
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Sometimes it feels like security and privacy are myths in this day and age of data leaks, hacking, and everything else. The latest example comes from a LocationSmart, a relatively obscure (to the public) location-as-a-service outfit has been leaking real-time location information of cell phone users on all of the...
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When testifying before Congress, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was upfront about the fact that Cambridge Analytica was probably not the only company to abuse the social network's policies and improperly obtain data about its users. An investigation would likely yield more incidents, and that's what we...
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Security researchers are warning anyone who uses PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) or S/MIME for email encryption to disable the scheme in their email clients right away, and to uninstall tools that automatically decrypt PGP-encrypted email, due to a security flaw. They've discovered a critical vulnerability dubbed EFAIL that...
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Android users have long been concerned that OS security updates for many phones come far too infrequently. Even those who are lucky enough to receive them may not get them often enough, considering they're typically released on a monthly cadence. At Google I/O this past week, however, there was some good news...
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If you use Facebook Messenger, hate malware, and always click on links you're sent without a second thought, then you're going to want to exercise more caution moving forward. A new strain of malware has been making the rounds since March, and depending on how you view things, the effect of "Nigelthorn" is somewhat...
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For many people, digital assistants have become a party of daily life—you might have Siri set a reminder for an upcoming appointment on your iPhone, or tell Alexa to order more laundry detergent from Amazon. These AI (artificial intelligence) assistants are becoming more capable by the day as well. But can they be...
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Smartphones routinely turn up in police investigations around the world and these devices often have clues on them that could help law enforcement to catch criminals. As it stands right now law enforcement has a few tools that it uses to gain access to these devices whether the owner wants to unlock them or is even...
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An increasing number of companies and agencies are turning to facial recognition technology for various things, but is it really ready for prime time? It's a valid question in the wake of some concerning developments, the latest of which involves the South Wales police force using facial recognition technology to scan...
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For the privileged Americans that can get fiber internet to their home with blazing fast upload/download speeds, there might be more to worry about than blowing through their data allotment in a couple days. Reports are surfacing that various GPON home routers have flaws that could allow nefarious hackers to bypass...
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Have you ever used the same password for multiple accounts? Maybe it's not particularly secure, either, because the really good ones are harder to remember—and no, 'monalisa' is not a secure password. Most will agree that password management is a pain in the backside, and if you wish there was a better way, well...
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