Cyber Security

Google has fixed a bug in its Gmail account retrieval and password reset process that could have allowed an attacker to fool a user into handing over their details. The bug, discovered by white-hat hacker Oren Hafif, has since been fixed and was confirmed as a ‘high impact’ vulnerability by Googler Sebastian Roschke on Google Continue Reading →

Phone theft is big business. However, in New York, iPhones and other Apple products are regarded as the ultimate heist. As Fox 5 New York reports, the NYPD announced that there were 16,000 Apple-picking thefts in 2012. This equates to 14 percent of all New York City crime. Indeed, 45 percent of all 2013 robberies Continue Reading →

Major US wireless carriers have rejected the idea of a “kill switch” security measure being added to Samsung’s popular Android phones, according to The New York Times. San Francisco district attorney George Gascón has been negotiating with Samsung to add tighter anti-theft features to its products, but mobile providers and the CTIA have reportedly come Continue Reading →

Doctor Beet was alarmed to notice that his LG TV was showing him ads on its home screen; he investigated and discovered a hidden, undocumented setting to switch off collection of his viewing habits. Still suspicious, he monitored the packets flowing from his TV’s network interface and discovered that even with the “data-collection off” setting Continue Reading →

Google extended its proactive Patch Reward Program to include even more open-source software (OSS). Among them is the Android Open Source Project, which the company previously did not reveal was going to be added. Last month, Google started providing financial incentives (between $500 and $3,133.70) for proactive improvements to OSS that go beyond merely fixing Continue Reading →

More than one percent of titles available in Google’s official Android app market may be unauthorized copycats of competing apps that have been re-engineered to more aggressively monitor browsing history and other personal habits, security researchers said on Monday. The study, published Monday by researchers from antivirus provider Bitdefender, analyzed 420,646 Android apps available in Continue Reading →

Google has entered into a $17 million settlement with 37 states and the District of Columbia after the company was found to circumvent privacy settings in Apple’s Safari browser. Between 2011 and 2012, Google secretly stored web tracking cookies in Safari, overriding Apple’s default settings that forbid third-party cookies from being installed. “By tracking millions Continue Reading →

Yahoo recently announced that it will encrypt webmail by default, and on Monday Marissa Mayer shared that the security measure will be applied across all Yahoo products “by the end of Q1 2014.” In a post on the company Tumblr, CEO Mayer outlined three specific measures to protect user data: Encrypt all information that moves Continue Reading →

Activist hackers linked to the collective known as Anonymous have secretly accessed US government computers and stolen sensitive information in a campaign that began almost a year ago, the FBI warned this week. The hackers exploited a flaw in Adobe Systems Inc’s software to launch a rash of electronic break-ins that began last December, the Continue Reading →

In response to the longtime, alarming proliferation of photos and videos containing child pornography on the Internet, Web search giants Google and Microsoft plan to introduce measures to block the content from their search results. The modifications will prevent more than 100,000 search terms from generating results that link to images and videos associated with Continue Reading →