Items tagged with security
Was your high-speed Internet service acting wonky yesterday? Are you a Charter customer? If you answered 'yes' to both questions, you're not alone. It appears that Charter, the nation's fourth largest cable operator, suffered a widespread outage in broadband Internet service starting on late Saturday afternoon and...
Read more...
Life certainly has become complicated ever since we stopped bartering goods and services with our neighbors in favor of using cash and credit. Think you're safe to go shopping with your debit card at a major retailer? You'd be mistaken -- according to an advisory put out by the Department of Homeland Security, over...
Read more...
Word to the wise -- be careful crossing through intersections, even when you have a green light. We don't want to overstate the threat, but apparently you really can hack into a traffic signal and change the light, just as you've seen in countless Hollywood films featuring the token computer hacker. This was proven by...
Read more...
At some point, you have to wonder if any database that can be hacked will be hacked. With so much of the world's precious information stored on drives in the forms of 1s and 0s, what's to stop ill-willed individuals from doing to every other company what they did last year to Target, for example? Clearly, not much, as...
Read more...
We're often told that having a kill switch in our mobile devices - mostly our smartphones - is a good thing. At a basic level, that's hard to disagree with. If every mobile device had a built-in kill switch, theft would go down. Who'd waste their time over a device that probably won't work for very long? Here's where...
Read more...
A lot has sure changed in the past year, especially since the time before Edward Snowden, who we talked about yesterday, came forth with his NSA revelations. Anyone who cared about hiding their identity pre-Snowden were generally considered privacy nuts. But post-Snowden, the desire to keep private online suddenly...
Read more...
It took almost no time at all after Edward Snowden exposed some of the NSA's more questionable goings-on that a divide of public opinion could be seen. Some consider Snowden to be a national hero, while others consider him to be nothing more than a traitor. Some might even consider it a grave insult if Snowden were to...
Read more...
In case you missed it, Microsoft recently announced that its Internet Explorer browser will begin blocking out-of-date ActiveX controls starting September 9, 2014. This was originally supposed to go into effect tomorrow (August 12), though Microsoft decided to push things back a month to clear up customer confusion...
Read more...
A couple of weeks ago, reports hit the Web claiming that Chinese phone maker Xiaomi was sending user info back to home base. At the time, the company's head of global expansion, ex-Googler Hugo Barra, claimed that no such thing was going on. But late last week, Finnish security firm F-Secure posted proof to the Web...
Read more...
As the owner of two cats that have been indoor pets their entire lives, I couldn't imagine letting them wander outdoors. If that wasn't the case, though, I know exactly what I'd do: I'd make their adventure, my adventure. That's just what security researcher Gene Bransfield did with the help of his wife's grandmother's cat. With a collar...
Read more...
Call it the 'Edward Snowden' impact if you must, but there's no doubt that insight on the NSA's activities have technology companies working overtime to restore and regain trust. Following Google's lead to encrypt email communication, Yahoo will now do similarly by crafting a secure email system that should go online...
Read more...
China's concern over security and U.S. spying habits apparently don't extend over to popular Apple products like the iPad and MacBook Air as previously thought. Responding to a Bloomberg report earlier in the week saying that China removed 10 Apple products from its government procurement lists over security concerns...
Read more...
We talked last week about the latest security issue to plague Google's ultra-popular Android OS, which at the time topped-off what seems like a never-ending list of issues researchers raise about the OS. With a just-released Cisco report, it looks like not a thing is going to change, much to Google's chagrin, I'm...
Read more...
More details have surfaced on how the FBI uses its own custom malware to penetrate the Tor network's anonymizing service -- and while those tools have been deployed in some important investigations, it's sure to raise hackles in the post-Snowden era. Several years ago, the FBI launched a major sting operation against...
Read more...
BlackBerry's bread and butter has always been the enterprise sector, and in a bid to make sure it retains that market, the Canadian handset maker went out and acquired Secusmart, a major player in high-security voice and data encryption and anti-eavesdropping solutions for government organizations, enterprises, and...
Read more...
Another day, another report of a potential hack that could cause some real trouble. Researchers at Berlin's SR Labs have discovered that firmware can be rewritten on any sort of USB device, be it a keyboard, a mouse, or a flash drive, and exploits could involve logging keystrokes, eavesdropping on communications...
Read more...
Google's Android OS has received its fair share of flack over the past couple of years for its security issues, but sometimes, it's not the company or its OS at fault: It's the third-party developers. Proof of that can be seen from the results of a recent study conducted by the same firm, Codenomicon, that discovered...
Read more...
Big trouble in China? We're not sure, though reports are surfacing that Chinese government officials have been making unannounced visits to Microsoft's offices in China. Microsoft is keeping mum on the visits, and so is China's State Administration for Industry & Commerce, which Chinese media reports had made...
Read more...
It goes without saying that technology can be amazing, but at the same time, some aspects of it can be downright scary. The latest example of that comes from Oxford, where a team of researchers have developed "e-DNA", a foolproof solution, they claim, that can single you out on the Internet. Like our real DNA, our...
Read more...
It looks like Tesla has a few security vulnerabilities to address. That much became evident after Chinese hackers participating in a hacking competition at the annual Syscan conference in Beijing took advantage of a vulnerability in a Tesla Model S electric car that allowed them to honk the horn, unlock the doors, and...
Read more...
Don’t freak out, but Facebook is testing a new feature that would put “Buy” buttons on ads within the social network. Simply, users would see an ad, and the ad would have a button that you could click to purchase the item you see, all without leaving Facebook. This is an obvious evolution of having ads on Facebook, and it...
Read more...
In case you hadn’t heard, data breaches are a problem--a huge problem--and to quantify that somewhat, New York AG Eric Schneiderman released a report detailing his state’s data breach information including the costs involved. There’s a lot of meaty data in the report, but one part that stands out is...
Read more...
