Security

I've never taken that much notice of my privacy, or lack of, as I've been surfing the Web. However, after recent, obviously targeted advertising directed at me, where the ads blatantly reflected some product research I had just performed, I decided to investigate. Innocuous focused advertising, whic...

It has been a heck of a year for password/password hash disclosures. In the same week in June, millions of password hashes were disclosed from LinkedIn, eHarmony and Last.fm. And in the same week in July, more than 450,000 usernames and unencrypted passwords were reportedly stolen from Yahoo Voice, ...

Symantec has determined that combining the newest version of its antivirus software with the decade-old Windows XP operating system can cause users' PCs to freeze up with the dreaded Blue Screen of Death. After Symantec analyzed the problem, it revealed that the incompatibility hit machines running ...

Skype IMs Go Rogue

Some users of Microsoft's Skype service are having problems with their text messages, as detailed in the Skype support network. Skype instant messaging contacts are getting messages originally addressed to others. A few users who got messages from one Skype contact found those messages were somehow ...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

DNSChanger: Just a Dress Rehearsal

Despite dire warnings, the Internet didn't break last week when the FBI pulled the plug on the server controlling the DNSChanger botnet. An estimated 300,000 computers are still infected by the malware that ties them to the botnet, which was designed for large-scale click fraud. Those machines' conn...

The passwords and usernames of more than 400,000 contributors to the Yahoo Voices website have been stolen and posted on the Internet. The hack was carried out by an organization calling itself "D33Ds Company," which posted the data on the Web. The D33Ds Web page containing the data was down when ch...

A congressional inquiry conducted at the behest of Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., found that law enforcement agencies made 1.3 million requests to cellphone carriers in 2011. They sought such information as individuals' text messages, their locations, and even lists of phone numbers they called when i...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Stuxnet Is Dead, Long Live Stuxnet

Those who follow the exploits of Stuxnet will remember June 24, 2012, as Big Sleep day for the infamous malware. On that day, it stopped replicating. "It's more like neutered, rather than dead," said Eric Byres, CTO and vice president for engineering at Tofino Security Products. "The June 24 date st...

Anywhere from 250,000 to 500,000 computers worldwide may lose Web access Monday morning if their users don't manage to remove malware called "DNSChanger" from their machines. A massive public information campaign has been undertaken over the last several months to inform people about the virus and h...

It may seem like Houdini is inside the network, because the perimeter as we have known it is disappearing. Conceptually, firewalls used to sit between the public Internet and the internal network with its servers, desktops and applications. There was a clear network perimeter separating internal res...

Facebook's email drama continues to unfold a week after it was revealed that the social network unilaterally switched its users' publicly posted email listings to their "@facebook.com" addresses. More recently, users have begun complaining that Facebook's mobile app seems to be swapping out informat...

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have demonstrated that a civilian drone can be hijacked by spoofing its GPS signals. The news comes as the United States Federal Aviation Authority prepares to integrate drones into the country's national airspace system. This task is mandated by the ...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

RSA Encryption 'Crack' Rattles Infosec Industry

Claims by a team of international cyrptographic researchers that they've "cracked" the RSA encryption used on a number of smartcards and secure tokens has set off a tempest in security circles. The scientists from France, Italy, Norway and the United States have found a method for compromising the c...

When Microsoft announced recently that Internet Explorer 10 will have its Do Not Track feature turned on by default, it seemed those concerned about online privacy would hail the move as a step in the right direction. Consumer advocates and other groups had been agitating for such a feature for some...

Facebook rolled out a new mobile social discovery tool recently, only to deactivate it hours later and pull it from its iOS and Android apps. The service, which Facebook called "Find Friends Nearby," was designed to help Facebook users find other users who were in the same vicinity. Before the compa...

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