Cyber Security

Target’s massive data breach, which occurred in mid-December of last year, has affected millions of customers, but the company has remained quiet about how personal and financial information was leaked. But CEO Gregg Steinhafel’s interview with CNBC finally shed some light on the attack, and it’s not pretty: the information was lifted via malware distributed Continue Reading →

The malware attack that took advantage of Yahoo’s Java-based ad network around Christmas Eve was far greater than anticipated, the company confirmed in a post (via CNET) on its help web pages. Initially believed to have affected only European users on January 3, 2014, the malware ad attacks were then said to have occurred during Continue Reading →

PasswordBox was named the 2014 CES Mobile App Showdown winner. One of the app’s most innovative features is Digital Legacy, which lets you share your social passwords with a trusted family member to help manage what happens to social accounts after death — like your Facebook account, for instance. To get a good sense of what, exactly, this entails, Continue Reading →

President Obama will unveil his proposed reforms to the nation’s surveillance programs in a speech next Friday, Jan. 17, the White House announced. “He will be remaking remarks to discuss the outcomes of the work that has been done in the review process,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said. The administration provided no details Continue Reading →

Target Corp and Neiman Marcus are not the only U.S. retailers whose networks were breached over the holiday shopping season last year, according to sources familiar with attacks on other merchants that have yet to be publicly disclosed. Smaller breaches on at least three other well-known U.S. retailers took place and were conducted using similar Continue Reading →

Evan Spiegel blew it. For months, security researchers warned Spiegel that Snapchat, the social media platform he and a Stanford buddy created, had a major privacy flaw. The Huffington Post writes Spiegel and his team never fixed the problem. Then, in late 2013, a hacker stole phone records and usernames of millions of Snapchat users and Continue Reading →

Google on Thursday is making a change to Gmail that will further bake in Google+ to its webmail product in a way that’s actually somewhat practical, though also potentially invasive. Going forward, you’ll now be able to directly email your Google+ contacts from Gmail, even if you don’t know their email address. And by default, Continue Reading →

The social network Snapchat has hired lobbyists in Washington for the first time. Snapchat, which allows users to send photos and videos that disappear after a certain amount of time, has signed up with the powerhouse K Street firm Heather Podesta + Partners, according to a lobbying disclosure form filed Jan. 1. The lobbying firm Continue Reading →

“The fact that private industry now works in tandem with the government to stalk and track us online may deflect but cannot dilute the moral argument. It seems little considerations like the prohibitions against “unreasonable search and seizure” enshrined in our Bill of Rights never made it onto the Behavioral Targeting agenda. — Jaffer Ali Continue Reading →

A malware attack hit Yahoo’s advertising server over the last few days, affecting thousands of users in various countries, an Internet security firm said. In a blog post, Fox-IT said Yahoo’s servers were releasing an “exploit kit” that exploited vulnerabilities in Java and installed malware. “Clients visiting yahoo.com received advertisements served by ads.yahoo.com,” the internet security firm Continue Reading →