Security researchers have discovered critical vulnerabilities in popular off-the-shelf HP, Acer, Dell, Asus and Lenovo laptops that make it possible for hackers to hijack and compromise the PCs in less than 10 minutes. Among cybersecurity professionals, it’s commonly known that if you want to have a secure PC, you probably shouldn’t use a regular off-the-shelf consumer laptop as they come with ‘bloatware’, or third-party...
Today, we’re announcing a variety of new protections that will help keep Gmail users even safer and promote email security best practices across the Internet as a whole. New tools and industry standards make email even safer On Safer Internet Day this year, we introduced a new visual element to Gmail that lets users know when they’ve received a message that wasn’t delivered using...
Last week, the Department of Justice filed its response to Apple’s appeal in the ongoing San Bernardino case. The government is attempting to force Apple to create a method of bypassing the security that would unlock an iPhone 5C that belonged to the shooter, Apple is fighting this demand by arguing against the 1789 All Writs Act that the DOJ has used against it....
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has announced that it has found Verizon Wireless to have deliberately violated the privacy of its users by using a supercookie. Verizon Wireless is the largest US carrier with over 100m subscribers, but failed to disclose the practice of using supercookies in order to violate their users privacy from late 2012 until 2014, violating a 2010 FCC regulation on Internet transparency. Supercookies...
MIT researchers have a great new way to protect your privacy on your smartphone: Stop giving your data away. It doesn’t take a PhD to come up with this statement, but such a feat is clearly easier said than done. Even without NSA spying, a growing number of mobile and web-based apps collect information about us from our devices in exchange for providing a...
Bromium has just published the results of “Endpoint Protection: Attitudes and Opinions,” a survey of more than 300 information security professionals, focused on end user threats and security. The majority of the respondents believe: Existing security solutions are unable to stop endpoint infections, Anti-virus is unable to stop advanced targeted attacks and End users are their biggest security headache.
We reported earlier this week on how financial organizations are at risk from third parties with compromised security. It seems that the same thing applies to software. The latest review by IT security specialist Secunia shows that third-party programs are responsible for 76 percent of the vulnerabilities discovered in the 50 most popular programs in 2013. Secunia's review looks at the top 50 programs...
California-based password management software specialist SplashData has released the results of its annual list of the internet’s worst passwords. For the first time “password” has been knocked off the number one slot. This doesn’t mean people are getting more security minded, however, as it’s been replaced by the equally obvious “123456”. SplashData compiles the list from files containing stolen passwords posted online during the...
Canonical, the maker of Ubuntu, has been fending off criticism from privacy advocates because the desktop search tool in recent versions of the operating system also searches the Internet. That means if you're searching your desktop for a file or application, you might also see results from Amazon or other websites. One person who dislikes Canonical's search tool is Micah Lee, a technologist at...
CAPTCHA are a thorn in the side of web users. Those almost indecipherable string of letters and numbers that are meant to help websites determine that you are a human rather than a spambot often cause more frustration for users than anything else, and they have now been cracked. Vicarious, a California-based AI team, reveals that it has been able to develop algorithms that...
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