Cyber Security

It’s been just two months since researcher Karsten Nohl demonstrated an attack he called BadUSB to a standing-room-only crowd at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, showing that it’s possible to corrupt any USB device with insidious, undetectable malware. Given the severity of that security problem—and the lack of any easy patch—Nohl has Continue Reading →

JPMorgan Chase & Co., the biggest U.S. bank, said a previously disclosed data breach affected 76 million households and 7 million small businesses. Customer names, addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses were taken, the New York-based bank said today in a regulatory filing. Hackers also obtained internal data identifying customers by category, such as whether Continue Reading →

The market for used iPhones is fraught with risk, because you may end up paying hundreds of dollars for a locked off device, or worse — one that appears legit but can’t make calls. However, Apple has just revealed an iCloud tool that lets you check a device’s activation lock status. All you’ll need is Continue Reading →

After a study on whether emotional manipulation in the News Feed could make people sad turned into a PR disaster, Facebook has now set up a formal review process for pre-approving research on its users, and Research At Facebook website to centralize all the academic work done on its enormous data set. Facebook admitting to Continue Reading →

Did you know that October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month? In a time when cyber security is at the forefront of everyone’s mind, Sticky Password, a password management software provider, recently announced a promotion. Sticky Password is offering retail customers a lifetime license of its software, which includes three software licenses and free lifetime upgrades for Continue Reading →

Over the weekend, the world wide web became a lot more secure. That’s because a San Francisco started called CloudFlare turned on a free service that will let its 2 million customers add SSL encryption to their websites. SSL—short for “secure sockets layer”—makes it harder for criminals to spoof sites, and it encodes site traffic Continue Reading →

Apple has just released a new download for users on OS X Mavericks to address the recently-discovered “Shellshock” bug. Apple previously noted that that only a few Macs were actually impacted by the bug and that most users were protected by default. The company promised to release an update shortly to address those who had Continue Reading →

Ello, the upstart social network that’s grown in massive popularity of the past week, was down for 35 minutes on Sunday. Whether for maintenance or more nefarious purposes, it isn’t outwardly explicit. According to its current status page, the site is investigating the cause but is leaning toward a possible denial of service (DDoS) attack. The Continue Reading →

Apple has responded to concerns about “Shellshock,” a pair of vulnerabilities in versions of the GNU Bourne-Again Shell (bash), issuing a statement that the company is “working to quickly provide a fix” to the vulnerability. However, a company spokesperson said that most Mac OS X users have nothing to fear. “The vast majority of OS Continue Reading →

Linux users got a nasty surprise on Wednesday, as a security team at Red Hat uncovered a subtle but dangerous bug in the Bash shell, one of the most versatile and widely used utilities in Linux. It’s being called the Bash bug, or Shellshock. When accessed properly, the bug allows for an attacker’s code to Continue Reading →