Safety Security & Privacy

Antivirus is dead, according to the company that invented it. Symantec is amending its 25-year-old anti-malware product because it doesn’t work. “We don’t think of antivirus as a moneymaker in any way,” Symantec’s senior vice president for information security told The Wall Street Journal. Companies spend billions of dollars on cyber-security systems only to have Continue Reading →

A recently found flaw in Internet Explorer left every version of the browser since IE6 vulnerable to attack. Microsoft fixed the problem and released an emergency patch to secure the flaw. If you’re on a Windows-based machine, you should receive the patch automatically. But if you want to double-check and make sure your browser and Continue Reading →

Following in the steps of the OpenSSL vulnerability Heartbleed, another major flaw has been found in popular open-source security software. This time, the holes have been found in the login tools OAuth and OpenID, used by many websites and tech titans including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and LinkedIn, among others. Wang Jing, a Ph.D student at Continue Reading →

Anyone visiting Yahoo will be tracked by default, regardless of whether they’ve enabled the Do Not Track setting on their browser. It’s a bold stance by the company, which described the shift as a personalized experience by default, and a serious blow for the Do Not Track standard, which has suffered major setbacks in recent Continue Reading →

Symantec has seen another round of a ham-fisted but surprisingly successful attack that targets Facebook users hoping to break into their friends’ accounts. The seed of the scam is a video on Facebook that claims to offer a tool for obtaining login credentials for friends’ accounts. Instead, it hacks the person’s own account, said Satnam Continue Reading →

Microsoft announced on Thursday it is releasing an emergency patch for Internet Explorer to fix a zero-day flaw spotted in the wild. The security hole was found in IE6 through IE11, and the company says its update “is fully tested and ready for release for all affected versions of the browser.” While this normally means Continue Reading →

At its F8 developer conference on Wednesday, Facebook announced a new version of its login system for third-party apps that lets people log in anonymously so they can demo apps before they provide their personal data. The new login also gives you total granular control over what data types you give an app. In addition, Continue Reading →

Google engineer Adam Langley published a blog post taking issue with the GRC characterization that Chrome’s CRLSet is “completely broken.” In the post, Langley said he has always been clear that the measure isn’t perfect, but in any event, it’s more effective than the revocation checks on by default in other browsers. “And yet, GRC Continue Reading →

Google said Wednesday that it stopped scanning student Gmail accounts for advertising purposes after the practice was scrutinized during a recent court case. Google Apps for Education, a free service used by more than 30 million students, teachers and administrators, offers Gmail email accounts, as well as calendars, cloud storage and document creation. Google didn’t Continue Reading →

Microsoft has yet to patch its latest critical Internet Explorer zero-day security flaw, but an advisory about the bug now offers two temporary solutions. Updated on Monday, Microsoft Security Advisory 2963983 offers new information about the new zero-day vulnerability that affects all versions of Internet Explorer. The flaw could allow remote code execution and has Continue Reading →