Safety Security & Privacy

Security researchers have documented another first in the annals of Android malware: a trojan that encrypts photos, videos, and documents stored on a device and demands a ransom for them to be restored. The crudeness of Android/Simplocker, as the malicious app has been dubbed, suggests it’s still in the proof-of-concept phase, Robert Lipovsky, a malware Continue Reading →

The world’s second-biggest mobile phone company Vodafone revealed government agencies in six unidentified countries use its network to listen to and record customers’ calls, showing the scale of telecom eavesdropping around the world. The United States and Britain both came in for global scrutiny and criticism after Edward Snowden, a former contractor with the U.S. Continue Reading →

Just about every week, a popular website – or two – gets hacked and leaves you vulnerable. Making your social media accounts more secure is relatively quick and easy. Here’s what you should do. First, enable two-step verification on every site you can. Two-step verification, adds another layer of protection to your account by making Continue Reading →

The internet is still reeling from the discovery of the Heartbleed vulnerability, a software flaw exposed in April that broke most implementations of the widely used encryption protocol SSL. Now, before Heartbleed has even fully healed, another major bug has ripped off the scab. On Thursday, the OpenSSL Foundation published an advisory warning to users Continue Reading →

Google is taking another step towards an internet that can stand up to snooping from the NSA. On Tuesday, the company released the source code for a new web browser plugin that encrypts your email messages before they’re sent across the net. Dubbed End-to-End, the plugin aims to prevent interlopers from reading messages even if Continue Reading →

The UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) is urging the public to take advantage of a two-week window to protect themselves against the GoZeuS and CryptoLocker malware, which has been holding people’s personal content to ransom and fraudulently transferring cash from online accounts. The organization said that the alert “is part of one of the largest Continue Reading →

The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents. The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to Continue Reading →

Seven weeks after the bug put the web on high alert, Heartbleed is still causing problems. A new report from Portuguese security researcher Luis Grangeia describes how the same bug could be used over Wi-Fi to enable new kinds of attacks that build on the same vulnerability. Dubbed Cupid, the new line of attack would Continue Reading →

Ever since Europe’s version of the Supreme Court ruled that search engines need to remove links that are outdated or “irrelevant” from the search results of individuals in European countries, thousands of requests have been flowing into the search giant, ranging from a person convicted of possession of child porn who wants news articles about Continue Reading →

Iranian spies appear to be engaged in their most elaborate and persistent effort yet to dupe lawmakers, journalists and defense contractors into revealing email addresses, network logins and other information that could be used to collect intelligence. A three-year espionage campaign, believed to have originated in Iran, has used an elaborate scheme involving a fabricated Continue Reading →