Items tagged with security
Windows XP enjoyed a nice, long run, but after over a decade of faithful service, Microsoft finally pulled the plug on the legacy operating system and discontinued support in April of last year. All but the most diehard fans have since moved on, though it's still installed on more desktops than Windows 8.1, and on...
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Adobe's Flash Player has more holes than Swiss cheese, only Swiss cheese doesn't leave you vulnerable to hacker attacks. Flash Player often does, and yet again, there's a zero-day exploit that could allow an attacker to take control of an affected system. The discovered vulnerability and its severity has led to Adobe...
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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...
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Following reports that 600 million Samsung phones are vulnerable to a security flaw that could allow an attacker to remotely execute code as a privileged/system user, the South Korean handset maker said a fix is on the way. Samsung also downplayed the severity of the situation, saying that the exploit "requires a very...
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If you didn't know what HTTPS was two-years-ago, chances are you're familiar with it now. Ever since Edward Snowden blew the whistle on NSA spying, the world has gradually been improving its efforts to to protect its data - either at the user or government level.
Last fall, Google said that it was going to begin preferring websites that
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Major League Baseball has worked hard to improve its image and move on from the so-called steroids era, a period in baseball where many records were broken by players who were later found to have been doping up and using human growth hormones. But the latest scandal takes an unexpected and perhaps unprecedented twist...
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"Xara" might sound like a cool name for an exploit, but according to researchers at three different US universities, it's one that should cause some alarm. At its root, if Xara is properly exploited, attackers would be able to procure passwords stored in OS X's Keychain, which could be used for most or all of...
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The pre-installed keyboard found on more than 600 million Samsung mobile devices has a vulnerability that could allow an attacker to remotely execute code as a privileged/system user. Ryan Welton, a researcher with mobile security firm NowSecure, discovered the flaw and gave Samsung a heads up back in December of last...
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Microsoft this week announced that web searches made using the company's Bing search engine will soon be encrypted by default. In actuality, users have been able to encrypt searches made via Bing for around a year and a half now, though sometime before summer comes to an end, it will be a standard option for all users. The move will level
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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
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Google is putting up some serious cash in hopes that security researchers and Android dissectors in general will root out security vulnerabilities in exchange for monetary rewards. The expansion of its bug bounty program over to Android represents the first time the mobile operating system has been included, though at...
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Remember when skirmishes were fought on land, air, and sea? They still are, though in today's world, you can add cyberspace to the list. Cyber warfare has become a point of focus, and lest anyone doubt it, consider that that the U.S. Navy is looking to buy zero-day exploits, particularly those used on commercial...
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Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Tom Wheeler has asked the wireless industry to voluntarily support the addition of features that would make it more difficult and/or less desirable for for thieves to steal mobile phones. A couple of the measures the FCC would like to see smartphone makers and wireless carriers adopt include
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Jan Souček, a security researcher from Prague, has uncovered a vulnerability in the security of the iOS Mail application that nefarious types can deploy against users of the app to gain access to their iCloud passwords.
The method published by Souček illustrates how an email can be sent to the hapless victim that...
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If you've been itching to give your Nest smart thermostat a security camera sibling, your oddly specific desire can soon become a reality. It appears that Nest will be unveiling a security camera next week that shows off its Dropcam lineage, but has been given an aesthetics overhaul to look great wherever you want to...
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Leading antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab said that it recently suffered a security breach involving at least three techniques that it had never seen before. The AV company described the attack as "one of the most sophisticated campaigns ever seen," though it believes it was able to detect the intrusion at an early stage, thereby mitigating the
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It's been a full two years since Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the massive spying efforts of the NSA, and despite the sheer amount of information and revelations that have come out since then, there still seems to be a lot more to come.
The latest reveal involves the NSA running an intrusion detection system...
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Like something out of a sci-fi movie, researchers from Binghamton University just published a study on the use of brain signals to replace traditional means of logging into secure accounts, such passwords, fingerprint reading, and even fancy retina scans. What the researchers found is that your brain responds to...
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After mainboard vendors began adopting EFI en masse in recent years, security researchers all over have dissected the many different implementations out there to find that elusive crippling bug. Sometimes, though, such bugs are not actually elusive at all, like one just discovered by reverse engineering enthusiast...
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As more and more of our daily lives shift online, there's an increased need to take control of privacy and security settings. That's not always easy to do, depending on the service. With that in mind, Google today unveiled a new hub for managing your Google settings called My Account, which gives you quick access to...
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Given their importance, it'd be easy to believe that an institution such as the IRS would have sufficient security measures in place to protect our data - the tax information of everyone in the United States. As we discovered last week though, that's not at all the case.
We learned on Wednesday that at least...
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It's now believed that a crime syndicate in Russia is responsible for a security breach resulting in the theft of IRS records containing personally identifiable information for over 100,000 taxpayers. The sole purpose of the theft was to engage in identity theft for the purposes of tax fraud, a scheme that was used to file some $50 million
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