Items tagged with security
Show of hands, who actually likes paying taxes? Anyone? It's not one of our favorite tasks either, and to add insult to injury, a band of advanced hackers reportedly infiltrated the Internal Revenue Service's records to collect personally identifiable information from over 100,000 taxpayers. It's believed that the...
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Surfing the murkier regions of the Internet is hardly anonymous these days, but Britain’s government appears poised to require Britons to identify themselves before entering porn sites. The U.K. government is trying to find a way to verify user’s ages to prevent underage viewers from accessing adult content.
The...
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At this point, the resetting of a mobile phone to a from-the-factory state is something we have all done, perhaps simply to get a fresh start with a device that has become sluggish and over-burdened with years of downloaded flotsam. But more likely, we do it for the purpose of selling the phone or passing it along to...
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What better way is there to start off a weekend than to hear about a massive data breach? I can't think of one, and thanks to AdultFriendFinder, we don't have to go without.
According to UK news agency Channel 4, which traveled to the darkest depths of the Web to discover the issue, it found that the data of at...
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If you thought that there couldn't possibly be more unbelievable stories to stem from Edward Snowden's leaks, you're sorely mistaken. Today, we learn of a truly appalling effort that the NSA and its partners worked together on to intercept Android users' connections to install malware and soak up information.
The...
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CareFirst, a Blue Cross Blue Shield health insurer, announced on Wednesday that it was the target of a "sophisticated cyberattack," making it the third major healthcare player this year to suffer a security breach. In this instance, CareFirst estimates that around 1.1 million current and former members and individuals...
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Data security research player CrowdStrike is reporting a security flaw that could allow hackers to exploit and take over data centers from within. Given the nasty moniker "VENOM" (for "Virtualized Environment Neglected Operations Manipulation"), the vulnerability CrowdStrike uncovered is present in a common component...
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The market may be filled to the brim with image and video sharing websites, but one of the oldest ones, Photobucket, still proves to be a popular choice. As we're now finding out, though, it's a choice you may want to reconsider if you have an account with the service.
The US Department of Justice yesterday...
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Security firms and anti-malware providers sure do have their work cut out for them, a fact that seems to get emphasized every day. As attackers become more creative, researchers have to dig deep in order to understand how malware manages to hide itself so well. It used to be that static scanners would be suitable...
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Researchers from security outfit ESET discovered that several thousand servers running Linux and BSD have unwittingly been sending out spam as a result of a previously undiscovered malware infection. This has been going on for more than 5 years, as the malware was able to stay hidden all this time due to its...
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A serious flaw has been discovered in the software component of some routers that feature a Realtek chipset. In particular, routers that utilize a Realtek RTL81XXX chipset and also use the 1.3 SDK (or older, potentially), are vulnerable to an exploit that could see executable code run as root.
Because it's not...
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It looks like a cyberattack that hit the White House last year by Russian hackers was a bit more serious than originally presented. The biggest takeaway is the fact that president Obama's personal emails were accessed, including both sent and received messages. That's the downside; the upside is that it appears...
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Tesla might seem like it's an invincible company lately, but when it comes to software and social media, it shares the same risks us common folk do, something yesterday's events help emphasize. Nowadays, it's not at all surprising to learn that some company's Twitter account had its security breached, and likewise...
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The FTC has just laid the smackdown on yet another company that's been found guilty of exploiting mobile users without their knowledge. The FTC found that the company, called Nomi Technologies, even went against its own privacy policy mere months after it promised not to, in late 2012.
Nomi's business model...
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The House has just passed two cybersecurity bills that should cause some major concern for those who believe the US government's spying efforts have already gone way too far. The House Permanent Select Committee passed the 'Protecting Cyber Networks Act', while the House Homeland Security Committee passed the...
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In an effort to lock down our devices with better security, fingerprint scanning is growing in popularity. Unfortunately, as it exists in many current smartphones, including Samsung's previous generation Galaxy S5 device, this type of biometric security may have a severe security flaw, as researchers from security...
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It's been a mere day since we last talked about an SSL-related vulnerability in iOS, and we couldn't even make it beyond hump day before another popped-up. This one is quite interesting, though, and not to mention quite severe.
Researchers at Skycure have discovered that by generating a specifically-crafted SSL...
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A lot of the attention Windows 10 has received from the media has focused on consumer features and amenities, but there's quite a bit for enterprise users to look forward to as well. One of them is called Device Guard, a previously unnamed feature from Microsoft that gives organizations the ability to lock down...
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Another day, another story about a poor SSL implementation. According to analytics service SourceDNA, a staggering 1,500 iOS apps are bugged with a gaping HTTPS hole, allowing attackers to intercept traffic that should otherwise be secure.
The bug exists in a popular networking library called AFNetworking. If an...
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According to US-based security research firm FireEye, a Russian group it dubs APT28 is responsible for attacking a number of different government agency computers through exploitation of previously unknown vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash and Microsoft Windows.
To exploit a vulnerable system, attackers took advantage...
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One of the definitions of irony is "a situation that is strange or funny because things happen in a way that seems to be the opposite of what you expected." So here's a question -- what if a situation seems ironic, only those affected don't find it funny? Is it still ironic? We pose this question because Wink sent out...
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Here we go again. This past November, the US' Department of Justice latched onto public heartstrings by saying that encryption on mobile phones could lead to the death of children, and in January, president Obama followed-up to plainly say that encryption should under no circumstance hinder police and spy...
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