Safety Security & Privacy

A security researcher who found a major vulnerability in eBay’s website last week said a second flaw he found hasn’t been fixed and could be used to hijack user accounts. Jordan Lee Jones, a 19-year-old college student who lives in Stockton-on-Tees, U.K, said he notified eBay on Friday by email of the second vulnerability. It Continue Reading →

Android users will now have to download a new Spotify app if they wish to continue using the service, as the company reacts to a break-in that led to one user’s data compromised. Spotify reported on Tuesday that the company’s internal systems had been hacked. An investigation into the attack revealed that only one user’s Continue Reading →

Owners of Apple devices across Australia are having them digitally held for ransom by hackers demanding payment before they will relinquish control. iPad, iPhone and Mac owners in Queensland, NSW, Western Australia, South Australia and Victoria have reported having their devices held hostage. One iPhone user, a Fairfax Media employee in Sydney, said she was Continue Reading →

It can be easy to dismiss social media security as a chore to save for another day. Getting hacked is serious business though, and you could find your online identity stolen, your precious photos erased and your devices inaccessible. Fear not! We’ve put together some simple but effective ways of keeping the hackers out. Of Continue Reading →

Spotify users, take note. The music streaming service just posted a message on its company blog indicating that one user’s account was hacked, but assuring that steps are being taken to ensure others will not fall victim to the same exploit Over the coming days, the Spotify Android app will prompt users to re-enter their Continue Reading →

Chat systems like BBM and iMessage are typically very secure, since they’re encrypted end-to-end. However, they still have a glaring flaw: if intruders do crack the code, they can see everything you’ve said. That’s where BlackBerry’s soon-to-launch BBM Protected comes in. As the company showed at its BlackBerry Experience Washington event (CrackBerry’s video is below), Continue Reading →

  The US National Security Agency has been recording nearly every phone call made in Afghanistan, according to WikiLeaks. The recordings are being made as part of the same program that was reported earlier this week to be capturing nearly every call in the Bahamas, as well as phone records from Mexico, Kenya, and the Continue Reading →

In the early 1960s, Fernando Corbató helped deploy the first known computer password. He acknowledges the password’s flaws — there seems to be a major breach each month — and the public’s frustrations, having to remember strings of code for dozens of digital accounts. “Unfortunately it’s become kind of a nightmare,” he says. But at Continue Reading →

A critical security flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 has gone unfixed since October 2013, according to a new report from the Zero-Day Initiative. The report, which was issued because of ZDI’s policy to reveal zero-day flaws that go unfixed for more than 180 days, says that the vulnerability allows an attacker to run malicious Continue Reading →

In a rare move, Facebook announced Thursday that it will ratchet down the amount of sharing users are defaulted into. Starting Thursday, status updates will no longer be shared to the public automatically; instead, they will be shared only to friends. Facebook has made any items shared through the site available to the public since Continue Reading →