Security

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Ransomware Gang Targets Android Phones

The Reveton Gang is at it again. This time, though, they're targeting users of Android phones -- typically visitors to porn sites. The gang that pioneered the idea of locking up a target's computer and demanding a ransom to unlock it has turned its attention to the rapidly growing mobile market. Onc...

Snapchat has agreed to a settlement with the United States Federal Trade Commission to resolve privacy issues resulting from a hacker's publication in January of data associated with 4.6 million of its users. The company has not admitted any wrongdoing, but it has agreed to implement a comprehensive...

Future Tense Central and Etransfr have debuted Chadder, an app that sends private encrypted messages. The app is one of a growing number of security products built around encryption technology and touted as secure that hit the market following Edward Snowden's massive data dump revealing the extent ...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Security Pros Struggle With Cyberthreat Angst

As the volume and sophistication of cyberattacks increase, system defenders in the trenches are losing confidence in their ability to protect their organizations' information assets, suggests a survey released last week by Websense and the Ponemon Institute. The survey of almost 5,000 global IT secu...

When Microsoft included Windows XP in the Internet Explorer zero-day browser vulnerability patch it issued this week, some industry observers were stunned. Had the company decided to backtrack on its assertion that it would no longer support XP? Had it knuckled under to user protests? Not really. Re...

Smarting from speculation that the U.S. intelligence community hoarded knowledge about the Heartbleed bug that's placed millions of servers and devices that access the Internet at risk, the White House Tuesday gave the public some insight into how it decides to release information about vulnerabilit...

AOL on Monday disclosed that a "significant number" of user accounts had been hacked, confirming rumors swirling around the issue for a week and denying its week-ago statement that users' email accounts were being spoofed. The hackers stole users' email and postal addresses, address book contacts, e...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Cybersquatters Prepare for Mischief

Cybersquatting is a seedy practice that's as old as dot-com, but the upcoming expansion of domain names could be breathing new life into the practice, while offering seamier elements on the Net an invitation for mischief. In the early days of the Internet, nimble squatters would register domain name...

The Sports Torrent Network, a brazenly named file-sharing site, shut down after UK police threatened to put its operators behind bars for up to 10 years. TSTN was a hotbed for illicit broadcasts of European soccer, the National Hockey League, Formula 1 races and more. The site reportedly had about 2...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Banking Trojan Enters Mobiles via Facebook

Purveyors of a notorious mobile banking Trojan have started targeting Facebook users to infect Android smartphones. The Net predators use a desktop Trojan to leverage a Facebook socializer to install banking malware on their phone, ESET malware researcher Jean-Ian Boutin discovered last week. The de...

The chief executive of one of Germany's biggest media companies penned an open letter criticizing Google, saying that his company is afraid of Google and its ever-swelling power. The letter, written by Mathias Dopfner, the chief executive of media giant Axel Springer, opines that Google's technology...

The FBI is planning to have a fully operational facial recognition system in place by this summer and may be well on its way to reaching that goal. The system will be able to query a database of photos to identify individuals based on their appearance even if they do not have a criminal record, repo...

It's been more than a week since news of the Heartbleed flaw launched a frantic scramble on the Web, but security professionals' palpitations haven't subsided. The OpenSSL Software Foundation has issued a fix, and Google, Cisco, Juniper Networks, Akamai and hordes of other companies have begun pat...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

White Hats Use Heartbleed to Steal Keys

The tech industry reeled last week when security researchers discovered a flaw in a key security technology in the Internet's infrastructure. The bug, ghoulishly named "Heartbleed," was found in an open source library, OpenSSL, used by the protocol, SSL, used to encrypt data in transit on the Net. B...

Having become the first company to formally meet the European Union's data protection rules, Microsoft is trying to turn its trustworthiness into business in privacy-wary Europe. "For customers who care about privacy and compliance, there is no more committed partner than Microsoft," wrote Microsoft...

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