Safety Security & Privacy

eBay suffering the biggest hack of all time led to the exposure of lots of personal data including postal addresses, dates of birth and phone numbers for millions of people around the world. While the company insists no financial information was stolen, private personal data still holds a lot of value. But what options do Continue Reading →

Every major Internet browser has a feature that lets you tell a website that you don’t want it to collect personal information about you when you visit. And virtually every website ignores those requests. Tracking your online activities — and using that data to tailor marketing pitches — is central to how Internet companies make Continue Reading →

Home renting company Airbnb announced Wednesday that under pressure from the New York attorney general’s office, it will hand over the anonymized personal data of its New York hosts to the state. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman subpoenaed three years’ worth of data in 2013 in an effort to suss out whether Airbnb users Continue Reading →

A 27-year-old now-former sailor pleaded guilty in a federal court in Tulsa, Oklahoma on May 20 to charges of conspiracy after leading a band of hackers in the US and Canada from onboard an aircraft carrier. Nicholas Paul Knight, who was the system administrator for the USS Harry S. Truman’s nuclear reactors department, was caught Continue Reading →

Facebook revealed on Tuesday that it has added free downloads of anti-malware software to its abuse detection and prevention systems for users with infected devices. The service is provided with the help of security software makers F-Secure and Trend Micro. Facebook will recommend one of them based on the type of malware it detects. Here’s Continue Reading →

Adobe’s Shockwave Player bundles a version of the company’s Flash Player that is 15 months behind on security updates, a feature hackers can use to hijack both Windows PCs and Macs running it, a security expert has warned. The advisory about the risk from Shockwave, which was published in late 2012 by security researcher Will Continue Reading →

The popular online bidding site eBay is urging its customers to change their passwords after hackers managed to slip into one of its databases months ago. In a posting on the company’s website, eBay said a cyber-attack “compromised a database containing encrypted passwords and other non-financial data.” Hackers broke into the database “between late February Continue Reading →

Sprint will pay $7.5 million to resolve a Federal Communications Commission investigation over whether the carrier failed to respect consumer requests to opt out of phone and text marketing from the carrier. The FCC said in a statement that it is the largest-ever settlement over potential Do Not Call violations. It follows an earlier 2011 Continue Reading →

The National Security Agency is secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas. According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the surveillance is part of a top-secret system – code-named SOMALGET – that was implemented without the knowledge or consent of Continue Reading →

Some of the biggest U.S. retailers have banded together to share information about cyberthreats, in a bid to avert breaches like that suffered by Target last holiday season. Target, The Gap, Walgreens and J.C. Penney are among the members of the group, which will share real-time threat information with each other and with the Department Continue Reading →