An engineer has told a hacking conference how he turned a cat and a dog into tech weapons: the former to make a point and the latter for a prank. Gene Bransfield of Tenacity Solutions discussed his work at the DEFCON event and then followed up with an interview with the Guardian. His first project, […]
Facebook messages claiming to give you the chance to change the color of the site are, perhaps unsurprisingly, a phishing scam. Cheetah Mobile has the details: Once clicked, it leads users to a phishing website. Cheetah Mobile researchers have found this issue to be happening due to a vulnerability that lives in Facebook’s app page […]
The Tor Project says an attack on the network earlier this year may have left user identities exposed for up to five months. At the moment those behind Tor say they are uncertain exactly what the consequences of the attack, which ran from January 30 to July 4, are for users. The Tor Project says […]
Google is hiring full-time staff to try to hunt down zero-day vulnerabilities across all systems. It’s going to publish the results in a way it believes will be responsible but put pressure on firms to plug gaps quickly. The company’s Chris Evans says some of the company’s staff who work on securing Google services have […]
A Wall Street Journal journalist has published his Twitter password to prove the value of two-factor authentication. Christopher Mims remains unhacked, but his argument hasn’t been entirely borne out. Mims wrote a piece titled “The Password Is Finally Dying. Here’s Mine” with the subheading “Device-Based Authentication Is Making Passwords Irrelevant.” Ironically the piece is behind a […]
Figures from the New York Attorney General show a sharp fall in iPhone thefts correlating with Apple introducing a “kill switch” feature. The news comes as both Microsoft and Google say they’ll put such a feature into their operating systems. Several manufacturers and carriers had already committed to releasing or supporting software to remotely disable […]
Google plans to release a Chrome plugin to make it easier to send and receive encrypted emails. It’s also criticized e-mail providers who don’t encrypt messages by default — one of whom has already promised to change its ways. The End-to-End plugin is still at an alpha stage but Google has released the source code. […]
Several iPhone users say their phones have been hijacked by extortionists who’ve managed to ‘hack’ the Find My iPhone security tool. The victims have discovered that the tool — which is meant to be used by phone owners if their handset is lost or stolen — has been activated and their phone locked. They’ve then […]
Microsoft has changed its mind and decided it will issue a fix for a serious Internet Explorer bug for Windows XP users, despite officially ending support for the system last month. It was the first real test of Microsoft’s resolve to abandon XP, though it seemed inevitable it would face such a dilemma. At first […]
Boeing is to produce a smartphone that (from a software perspective at least) self-destructs if somebody tries to tamper with it. The Boeing Black is aimed at government contractors, the military and security agencies. Its existence had been rumoured for a couple of years, but it’s now been publicly confirmed thanks to a regulatory filing […]