Safety Security & Privacy

You may think you’re thwarting advertisers and other nosy web citizens by blocking cookies and invoking Do Not Track whenever possible, but that apparently isn’t good enough. Researchers have just documented a newer web tracking technique, canvas fingerprinting, that’s nearly impossible to stop. As it’s simply drawing a unique, hidden image using standard web code, Continue Reading →

Forensic scientist and author Jonathan Zdziarski has posted the slides from his talk at the Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE/X) conference in New York called Identifying Backdoors, Attack Points, and Surveillance Mechanisms in iOS Devices. The HOPE conference started in 1994 and bills itself as “one of the most creative and diverse hacker events in Continue Reading →

You’re sitting in your living room. All you want to do is watch some Game Of Thrones on your day off… but your Chromecast refuses to respond. All it will do is play Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up… over… and over again. It might be this little box’s fault. Built by security analyst Continue Reading →

Shenzhen is the Silicon Valley of mainland China. Situated about 50 minutes north of Hong Kong, the modern city is home to the Shenzhen Stock Exchange and numerous high-tech giants and startups. So naturally, the city’s five-star hotels regularly host wealthy moguls in their luxury rooms. Last year, one of those hotels also hosted a Continue Reading →

Tesla Motors officials vowed to investigate reports that its Model S sedan is susceptible to hacks that can remotely control the car’s locks, horn, headlights, and skylight while the car is in motion, according to a published report. The hacks were carried out at the Syscan 360 security conference in Beijing, an article published by Continue Reading →

Microsoft has started accepting requests from users in Europe who want to remove search links from Bing under a recent “right-to-be-forgotten” ruling by Europe’s top court. The company has asked European residents, who want Microsoft to block search results that show on Bing in response to searches of their names, to fill up a four-part Continue Reading →

Leicestershire Police will be the first force in the UK to conduct a six month trial of new facial recognition technology that promises to help identify individuals in just a few seconds. Called NeoFace, the system can compare any digital image (like CCTV or footage from body-worn cameras) with photos held on a police database Continue Reading →

Users should use and reuse weak passwords for websites which don’t hold valuable information, say researchers from Microsoft, overturning decades of accumulated wisdom on internet security. By not having to worry about remembering complex unique passwords for every individual website, users can focus their efforts on recalling secure passwords for high-value sites like banking or Continue Reading →

The US Secret Service is warning hotel operators to be on the lookout for malware that steals passwords and other sensitive data from guests using PCs in business centers, according to a published report. The non-public advisory was issued on last Thursday, KrebsOnSecurity reporter Brian Krebs reported Monday. Krebs said the notice warned that authorities Continue Reading →

Google announced on Tuesday that it is launching Project Zero, an internal team of security specialists tasked with finding vulnerabilities in third-party software — not to exploit them, but to alert the developers and avoid the next Heartbleed. The Heartbleed bug put the whole software industry on heightened alert, and Google, Facebook, Microsoft and many Continue Reading →