Items tagged with security
Looking for a solid and feature rich FTP client? FileZilla is one of the better ones out there, but surfer beware, malware writers have taken notice of the popular program and have decided to prey on individuals who aren't super diligent with their downloading habits. In other words, be real careful when downloading...
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Much has been made of the NSA’s domestic spying program and how the agency has culled data from major Internet companies, and rightly so, but Apple CEO Tim Cook says that his company is having none of it. In an interview with ABC News, Cook was emphatic. “Much of what has been said isn’t true,”...
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Google is putting up a ton of cash for the taking as part of this year's Pwnium hacking competition at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver in March. More than $2.7 million is up for grabs, which will be doled out in chunks to hackers who discover security vulnerabilities in Google's Chrome operating...
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To those of you who are using "password" to secure an account, you can rest slightly easier at night knowing that it longer tops the list of worst passwords. Two-time runner up "123456" has taken the dishonor of being the most common used password found on the Internet, giving the six-character combination the...
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Don't you miss the days when teenagers used to get in trouble for crossing over old man Jenkin's lawn on the way to school? It's a different a era we live in, one where the landscape is connected through cyberspace and ripe for mischief of a totally different kind. Hence it shouldn't be all that shocking to find out...
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Over the holidays, popular retailer Target admitted that it had been breached, with data of up to 40 million customers stolen. Weeks later, that number skyrocketed to 110 million. As we can now see, while it was Target that dominated the security headlines this past month, two other incidents seemingly flew under the...
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We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating as we enter the era of the Internet of Things (IoT): Anything that’s Internet-connected can be hacked. We’ve seen it recently with TRENDnet IP cameras and warned about it with Nest (even as Google snapped it up in a $3.2 billion acquisition this week). And now, a security company...
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It’s Patch Tuesday folks, and Microsoft has issued its monthly slew of updates. It’s more or less good news, as there are just four this time around, and none are labelled as “critical”--all four are merely “important”. Bulletin 1 is a remote code execution vulnerability that...
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This weekend, Dropbox experienced an outage that lasted far too long. A wing of hacker collective Anonymous claimed credit for the outage, saying it performed a database hack, which turned out to be a hoax. However, the group maintained that it did hit Dropbox with a DDoS attack, which was timed to coincide with the...
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According to security company Kaspersky Labs, hackers and cybercriminals are targeting gamers, with 11.7 million attacks on gamers in 2013 and some 4.6 million pieces of malware specifically designed to target them. Kaspersky says that’s about 34,000 attacks per day, on average. It’s perhaps not terribly...
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Just as Ricky Ricardo would often tell Lucille Ball in some manner or another, "Microsoft, you've got some explaining to do!" For the second time in less than two weeks, hackers representing the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) are taking credit for infiltrating Microsoft's Twitter account and posting messages warning...
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The data breach at Target that resulted in millions of customer credit and debit card data being compromised is much worse than initially thought. Target had revealed last month that as many as 40 million payment card accounts may have been impacted between November 27 and December 15, 2013, but the retail giant has...
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For a moment there, it appeared as though popular cloud storage service Dropbox had been hacked, with the user database accessed and user emails being exposed. Two loosely affiliated wings of hacker collective Anonymous, AnonOpsKorea and The 1775 Sec, claimed credit, but the whole thing was just a hoax timed to coincide with scheduled Dropbox...
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It's mighty convenient to load up a mobile banking app with a slick interface as opposed to logging into the website via your smartphone's web browser, but in doing so, you may inadvertently be putting yourself at a greater risk of so-called mail-in-the-middle attacks, hijack attempts, and other unfriendly behavior. A...
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After SnapChat got hacked, exposing millions of usernames and phone numbers, the company said that it was taking steps to fix the problem, but it did not apologize, which rubbed a lot of folks the wrong way. In its latest blog post, though, the company finally issued a mea culpa. “We are sorry for any problems...
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As if Yahoo needed more bad press after the slow-boil frustration that is the new Yahoo Mail, at least one security firm found that the company’s homepage served up malicious ads to potentially millions of users, with likely thousands infected. Security firm Fox IT, which operates Security Operations Center service ProtACT reported that...
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Earlier this week, news broke that a security exploit in Snapchat allowed hackers to claim some 4.6 million usernames and phone numbers from the service. The group responsible for the hack posted the list, with some information redacted, for all to see. Snapchat described the issue in a blog post, noting that it was...
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Snapchat is learning the hard way that success comes at a price. While the photo- and video-sharing service explodes with users and rejects mind-boggling buyout offers from the likes of Facebook, it has also attracted unwanted attention from security pros and hackers. Days ago, Gibson Security wrote a post about a...
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It'd be a little crazy to imagine ending 2013 without another breach-of-security story, so fortunate for us, BBC has come to the last-minute rescue. On December 25th, a Russian hacker is said to have listed a sale on a black market website that offered information about accessing a BBC server, something that US firm Hold Security picked up...
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Security researchers at Gibson Security handed Snapchat what amounts to a lump of a coal on Christmas morning by exposing a security flaw that, when exploited, would grant hackers access to users' phone numbers without their permission. It's essentially a how-to guide for hackers with detailed instructions, and the reason Gibson Security made...
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Mobile security has become an issue of increasing importance, as mobile use has skyrocketed in recent years while cybercriminals have simultaneously spent more time finding ways to attack. There are several solutions out there, but a major one is Samsung’s Knox. According to researchers at Ben-Gurion University...
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RSA decided to publicly address recent reports alleging it inked a $10 million contract with the National Security Agency (NSA) to use what's considered a flawed and broken encryption standard called elliptic curve cryptography. In an attempt to set the record straight, the RSA stated in a blog post that it's all a...
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