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SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Hackers Back to Their Old Tricks

Old tricks that have helped hackers penetrate computers for months or longer worked again last week at Goodwill and Stubhub. Taking a page from the gang that pillaged payment card and personal information from Target last year, hackers clipped payment card information from an undisclosed number of G...

Government snooping on Americans would be curtailed under a bill introduced Tuesday in the U.S. Senate. The measure, sponsored by Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., would ban bulk collection of domestic information, limit the scope of searches by government agencies, and add transparenc...

An Android vulnerability that exists in every version from v2.1 Eclair to v. 4.3 Jelly Bean could expose millions of users, Bluebox Security has warned. The flaw lets attackers fake the certificates of specially privileged parties, such as Adobe and Google Wallet, and serve them up with malware that...

OkCupid has admitted carrying out psychological experiments on its users. Because OkCupid doesn't really know what it's doing, it needs to experiment to see what works and what doesn't, cofounder Christian Rudder wrote in a blog post. Every Internet company needs to test different things with users,...

Bubblews, a social media platform that offers to pay users for their posts, last week moved out of its testing phase, which began in 2012. It emerged with a new look designed to attract users who might be dissatisfied with other social media offerings. Bubblews is attempting to build a self-sustaini...

A new way to extend battery life would allow smartphones to last three to four times longer on a single charge, Stanford University researchers have found. A team led by Yi Cui, professor of materials science and engineering, has developed pure metal anode prototypes, which differ from the lithium-i...

Skully had its coming-out party last week, and while the name unfortunately sounds like the nickname for any number of comic book villains -- from Skeletor to the Red Skull -- it is actually a firm that makes a pretty incredible high-technology motorcycle helmet, with technology similar to Google Gl...

Google is seeking 175 volunteers from whom it will collect bodily samples in an effort to create their biochemical fingerprints and establish the baseline for a healthy body. The Baseline study, to be run by Google X labs, will seek to connect traditional clinical observations of health, such as die...

The Apple deal with IBM has shown us a whole new side of Tim Cook -- the gushing, hype-laden, excited-but-still-vague Tim Cook who says things like "kindred spirit," "huge opportunity," and "radical step for enterprise." Who peppers his speech with words like "profound," "complementary," "landmark" ...

In a rare move, Apple on Thursday rolled out a beta version of its upcoming desktop operating system, OS X Yosemite, to a million "testers." The company pulled the wraps off Yosemite at the World Wide Developers Conference in June and has been tweaking it for developers since that time, but this lat...

Like many other tech companies, Twitter is largely made up of white, male employees, pointing to a lack of diversity in the industry. The company revealed statistics about its organizational demographics, noting that almost 60 percent of Twitter's U.S. employees self-identify as white. Just under 30...

Facebook this week launched a feature that allows users to save content from their News Feed that they might want to read or watch later. Called "Save," it is designed help users who may be inundated by links to articles, music clips and videos to separate the wheat from the chaff. "Every day, peop...

A patent awarded on Tuesday to Apple may be a tip-off of what the company is planning for the smartwatch it's widely expected to introduce this fall. The patent for something Apple referenced in its application as "iTime" is for an electronic wristband that contains a recessed area for an electronic...

Early reviews for Amazon's first foray into the smartphone market are mixed, with a general sense that the device is a good phone overlaid with some flashy features. Amazon announced the Fire Phone last month, trumpeting its 3D display, which uses facial recognition and front-facing cameras to shift...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Failure to Communicate Hamstrings Cyberdefenders

A failure to communicate between security pros and company brass may be contributing to the inability of a significant number of organizations to reduce the risk of cyberattacks on their systems. That was one of the findings last week in a study conducted by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by We...


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