Cyber Security

The Starbucks mobile app, the most used mobile-payment app in the U.S., has been storing usernames, email addresses and passwords in clear text, Starbucks executives confirmed late on Tuesday (Jan. 14). The credentials were stored in such a way that anyone with access to the phone can see the passwords and usernames by connecting the Continue Reading →

Security remains a major pain point for Bitcoin — as a number of hacks on companies involved with the virtual currency prove — and that’s led Coinbase, the most heavily funded Bitcoin startup out there, to beef up its measures. The company has extended its two-factor authentication security process when sending over $100 in Bitcoin Continue Reading →

The National Security Agency has implanted software in nearly 100,000 computers around the world that allows the United States to conduct surveillance on those machines and can also create a digital highway for launching cyberattacks. While most of the software is inserted by gaining access to computer networks, the N.S.A. has increasingly made use of Continue Reading →

Google recently unveiled a new Gmail feature – emailing Google+ users whose email address you actually don’t know. Moving forward, Gmail will suggest Google+ connections as recipients when a user composes a new email, without revealing the recipient’s email addresses to the sender until the recipient either replies to the email or follows the sender. Continue Reading →

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 →