Security

If you were applying to become the head of the World Trade Organisation, you might expect some scrutiny into your affairs. However, what you might draw the line at is a member of the Five Eyes intelligence agency utilising anti-terror tools to read your emails and potentially give your opponents …

Getting hacked is one of the worst scenarios for a modern day corporation. It damages reputation, relationships with your customers and can be a massive loss financially and in terms of secretive intellectual property. We've seen it happen with the likes of Sony multiple times in recent years and yet …

Several tech companies have been working on ways to replace the traditional password for quite a while now, some have moved to biometric scanners, like Apple with Touch ID but Yahoo wants to go in a different direction with mobile phone verification. Yahoo is currently setting up a system for ‘on-demand' …

Last year, JPMorgan Chase, one of the world's largest banking institutions, was made to look foolish when over 83 million email addresses, phone numbers and business addresses of its customers were stolen by hackers. However, while many other large firms experiencing big data breaches have come up empty when it …

An interesting change is taking place in the world of digital security. As it becomes more clear that nations around the world are constantly probing each other's online assets, firms once aligned together against malware and nefarious hackers, are now backing their host nations, injecting the world of cybersecurity with …

Despite current British Prime Minister David Cameron's insistence that he wants to see more Chinese filters affecting the UK's internet and his announcement that if re-elected he would ban effective encryption, the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology has published a report which suggests that doing so would be “not …

The Department of Justice over in the US has announced charges against three individuals over the theft of more than 1 billion email addresses over a three-year period. According to the indictment, Vietnamese citizen, Viet Quoc Nguyan, broke in to eight different email providers, harvesting a ton of personal information. …

With continued reveals of more government spying no matter where you are in the world, many organisations have been clamouring for software that makes our communications so obfuscated through encryption and other measures, that it becomes a waste of time to try and decipher even the most banal conversations. One …

Even though the battle between iOS and Android smartphones has been fought for years here in the ‘West,' in China, that war was lost long ago. With over 90 per cent of the country's smartphones running Android, you would think it's clear who the victor was, but in-fact it isn't …

It's no secret at this point that every member of the Five Eyes spying network (essentially every English speaking nation) has been snooping on not only their citizens, but everyone else's over the past few years, under the guise of anti-terrorism efforts. Despite this though, new revelations every few months …

TalkTalk is currently warning its customers that its servers were breached recently and user data may have been compromised. According to the UK ISP, cyber thieves may have been able to get their hands on account numbers and personal information, such as names and date of birth. Now with these …

The MEGA filelocker site was never designed to please US regulators. In-fact, if anything it was designed as a real middle finger to the establishment, after its predecessor, MegaUpload, was torn down in early 2012 and its founder, Kim Dotcom arrested in a raid on his New Zealand home. With …

Reddit is taking a stance on personal privacy and has enacted a new policy in its latest administrative changes update that will mean if anyone complains about a nude or sexually suggestive photo of themselves being disseminated on the site, it will be removed without question. Ultimately, any such photo …

CITIZENFOUR, the recently premiered documentary by Laura Poitras about the beginning of the Edward Snowden NSA revelations, has won an Oscar for “Best Documentary” at this year's Academy Awards ceremony. The film shows Snowden's efforts to expose the gross abuses of the US government's National Security Agency, along with the help of Laura Poitras …

Lenovo has recently been in hot water due to its use of Superfish, or what it calls “shopping aid” software, that it pre-installed on some of its laptops between September and January. It had originally said that the software was only being pulled temporally, while it waited for a new version …

Everything your phone transmits to and receives from your network providers phone tower is encrypted, so that only the network operator can receive your calls and data and route them as you request. This is all encrypted with a set of keys on the sim card inside your phone and another set …

Lenovo has a bit of a situation on its hands after customers and the security conscious noticed that some Lenovo PCs were shipping with an install tool known as Superfish on-board, which can result in adware as well as put communications at risk. It turns out, that some customers aren't too …

Currently, government agencies and local police forces in the US, are only able to obtain permission to hack into the computers and other electronic devices of suspects in their region and only then once they have a warrant. However, now the FBI and other organisations want to expand that power …

The Internet Engineering Task Force has just reached a consensus and finished finalising the next major update, to the HTTP standard that we all use every day. The specification  builds upon and is an alternative to, but does not obsolete, the HTTP/1.1 standard that was first introduced in 1999, that we currently use whenever …

Hot off of the heels of breaking news on the biggest digital bank heist run in history, Kaspersky labs, the anti-malware firm, has released a new batch of information that indirectly paints the NSA and the US government as having inserted malware into the firmware of commercial hard drives. While …

Microsoft is now the first major cloud provider to make use of the ISO/IEC 27018 international standard for cloud privacy. From now on, Microsoft Azure and Office 365 customers will be notified when a government data request is received, allowing for more transparency. The standard was published by the International …

Google's Project Zero was announced last year as a new way to help improve online security by identifying vulnerabilities in software and services. Upon finding a vulnerability, it is reported directly to the company in charge of the software or service affected, the developers then have a certain amount of …

According to anti-malware security firm Kapersky, many of the world's major banks have been hit by digital thieves over the past year and a half, with the attackers making off with at least $300 million, but potentially as much as a billion (£648 million), after using malware and social engineering …

In a move to help protect American online businesses and help them coordinate with US authorities, Obama has signed an executive order that will make federal agencies set up a way of sharing data between technicians in these businesses and federal agents. This information sharing will go both ways, with companies tipping …

If you have been using the same password for years, then perhaps this will encourage you not to. A researcher by the name of Mark Burnett, has released a list of over 10 million passwords and usernames which he was able to harvest in clear text from various websites and …

The hacktivist movement Anonymous has made good on its promises to target those associated with the violent extremist organisation, ISIS, by taking over and knocking out hundreds of websites and social media accounts that help promote the organisation and encourage recruitment from new members. Apparently though, this is just the …

If you own a voice activated smart TV from Samsung, there's a good chance it's recorded conversations you've had with people in the same room, whether it was turned on or not. The worst part of that privacy invasion however, is that Samsung has been sending that information to third …

You really should disable or uninstall Adobe Flash at this point. If you haven't yet done so however here is another reason, following on from last week's 0-day exploit; there is another critical vulnerability that is being actively exploited in the wild, the only difference this time is that there is …

Raptr, the social themed video game service that comes bundled with AMD's graphics card drivers, has been hacked. According to reports, passwords, usernames, first and last names may have been accessed and as a result, password changes are recommended. Raptr Founder and CEO, Dennis Fong, gave a statement on the security …

Oh Canada. So often forgotten during the Edward Snowden leaks. With all the attention on the likes of the US and UK for tapping into undersea cables and New Zealand for going after Kim Dotcom's file locker services, it's easy to forget that Canada, like the aforementioned nations and Australia, …