Items tagged with security
There are data breaches and then there are data breaches. The Target breach, for example, was (and continues to be) a total disaster for the company with millions affected. Other hacks are made better or worse by a given company’s attitude and response. Spotify has apparently experienced some sort of breach of its own, but if you’re...
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Although Microsoft has stopped supporting Windows XP, many people haven’t bothered to update from the legendary and now terribly aged operating system (you guys, seriously, just do it already). However, in what is the most perfect XP-related real-life joke ever, someone discovered that there’s a hacky...
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One of the most troubling facts that came out of Edward Snowden's disclosures last year was the degree to which the government has relied on National Security Letters to compel companies to reveal information about their clients without producing a warrant. Many NSLs were accompanied by non-disclosure orders that...
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Life just got a little easier for iPhone thieves, though technically that's not the intended purpose of a new tool that helps iDevice owners bypass Apple's iCloud activation lock. Officially -- and we're not sure if that comes with a *wink* *wink* or if the developers are being sincere -- a tool called "doulCi" is...
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Attention all eBay users, go ahead and change your password to the auction site. Like, right now -- we'll wait. Take your time, we'll be here when you get back. Finished? Good! Don't worry, it wasn't an arbitrary exercise -- eBay later today will be sending out emails and posting notices asking you to change your...
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China's Central Government Procurement Center has reportedly issued a ban on installing Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system on government computers. The ban is supposedly in place to ensure computer security after Microsoft decided to end support for Windows XP last April, a legacy OS that was released to the...
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The United States Justice Department has brought forth criminal charges against several members of Unit 61398 of the Chinese military, alleging that these members hacked into computer systems of six American businesses, including Alcoa Inc., United States Steel Crop, Allegheny Technologies Inc, Westinghouse Electric...
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One could make an argument that Microsoft is the king of mixed messages. Just look at how the Redmond software giant has handled Windows XP over the years -- it was given several reprieves before finally being shunned for support, though it still received an out-of-cycle patch for Internet Explorer to address a...
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A pair of healthcare organizations have agreed to pay a combined $4.8 million to settle charges that they potentially violated the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (otherwise known as HIPPA). The charges were the consequence of a data breach in which protected health information of thousands...
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Mere weeks after voting down legislation that would require smartphone makers to implement anti-theft technology into handsets, the California Senate on Thursday passed a revised version of the bill. As rewritten, technology titans Apple and Microsoft, both with vested interest in such a bill, withdrew opposition to...
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Symantec, which has been making antivirus products for decades (including Norton, the first piece of software most people would try to remove from a new PC), is getting out of the antivirus game, sort of. Brian Dye, Symantec's senior vice president for information security, told the Wall Street Journal that in...
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Rather than wait around another couple of weeks until this month's scheduled Patch Tuesday to address a security flaw in virtually all versions of its Internet Explorer browser, Microsoft decided the situation was serious enough to warrant an out-of-band security update. The fix has been fully tested and is ready to...
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AOL has experienced a nasty security breach that exposed a great deal of user information, and the company says that it was the work of criminal hackers, as opposed to some kind of glitch or oversight. “AOL is investigating a security incident that involved unauthorized access to AOL's network and systems. AOL...
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Google's open source Android platform has the distinction of being the most popular mobile operating system in the world. That's great in terms of dominating the market and reaping the rewards that come with it, but it's also for that very reason that Android finds itself the target of virtually every new mobile...
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If you haven't already, you should consider dropping Internet Explorer and using a browser like Chrome or Firefox, at least until Microsoft rolls out a fix for a zero day vulnerability that reportedly affects nearly every version of IE. Worse yet, if you're still stubbornly rocking Windows XP for whatever reason, this...
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Microsoft is scrambling to fix a security flaw in its Internet Explorer (IE) browser that could allow a hacker to remotely execute malicious code if users visit an infected website. Unfortunately, the security bug is present on just about every version of IE, and if you're a Windows XP user, be advised that no...
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Some might consider it to be a major breach of privacy, but Facebook sees it as a major feature. With "Nearby Friends", the Facebook mobile app will be able to tell you if any of your contacts are - as you'd expect - nearby. This feature was first rumored just over a year ago, and at the time, many were up-in-arms -...
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LaCie is in the process of informing its customers that any purchases made on the company's website within the last year could be compromised. The even scarier part about this is that the suspected data breach could have went on longer -- maybe much longer -- if the FBI didn't inform LaCie last month that it had...
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It appears that smartphone makers have been watching too many spy flicks, hence the sudden fascination with fingerprint scanning as a security measure. While that may seem like a fine and dandy idea on paper -- and in Hollywood -- the truth is, the biometric technology that's available for consumer handsets just isn't...
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Riddle us this - what do Windows XP and Windows 8.1 have in common? They're both in Microsoft's rear view mirror, and come May 13, 2014, the latter will also no longer receive security updates. Scratching your head? Here's the thing -- Microsoft isn't abandoning its newest operating system, but it is forcing users to...
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The news of two truly horrible security breaches broke this year; one was the NSA’s shadowy data grabbing and surveillance program, and the other was the Heartbleed bug that left about two-thirds of the Internet utterly exposed to any bad actor. According to a Bloomberg report, these two stories have merged, as “two people familiar...
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The discovery of a security vulnerability in OpenSSH, which is a set of programs that provide encrypted communication sessions using the SSH protocol for an estimated two-thirds of the web, challenged the notion that anyone can ever be truly safe on the Internet, regardless of how careful you surf. How so? Researchers...
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