Safety Security & Privacy

  A researcher has refined an attack on wireless routers with poorly implemented versions of the Wi-Fi Protected Setup that allows someone to quickly gain access to a router’s network. The attack exploits weak randomization, or the lack of randomization, in a key used to authenticate hardware PINs on some implementations of Wi-Fi Protected Setup, Continue Reading →

Whether you’re the type of person who always needs the latest and greatest smartphone or you’re content to wait two years to upgrade, chances are good you probably have some old smartphones kicking around in a closet or junk drawer somewhere. Before you go and sell an old Android device, though, there are a few Continue Reading →

The FBI said it is investigating media reports that several U.S. financial firms have been victims of recent cyber attacks. “We are working with the United States Secret Service to determine the scope of recently reported cyber attacks against several American financial institutions,” FBI spokesman Joshua Campbell said in a statement late on Wednesday. He Continue Reading →

By signing in to a law a bill that requires anti-theft kill switches on smartphones, California Gov. Jerry Brown has set what will likely be a nationwide standard for wireless devices shipped across the nation. The law, which Brown signed Monday, takes effect in July 2015. It requires smartphones sold in the state to come Continue Reading →

A security precaution skipped in mobile applications such as Facebook’s Messenger could be abused to make an expensive phone call at a victim’s expense, a developer contends. Phone numbers often appear as links on a mobile device. That is possible by using a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) scheme called ”tel” to trigger a call. URI Continue Reading →

More than 1,000 American businesses have been affected by the cyberattack that hit the in-store cash register systems at Target, Supervalu and most recently UPS Stores. The attacks are much more pervasive than previously reported, and hackers are pilfering the data of millions of payment cards from American consumers without companies knowing about it, according Continue Reading →

“This is the third girl I’ve dated in three weeks, and none of them know about each other.” “I’m late. I don’t know how to tell my husband. Especially since he had a vasectomy.”  “Is Lucy the cutest dog?” These are recent posts on the mobile confessional app Secret, posts which typically veer toward the Continue Reading →

If you’re putting your Android phone or tablet up for sale on eBay, then a factory reset might not be enough to destroy all of the data on it. On some devices, the files and photos on your phone aren’t actually erased—just the references and file structure around them. With a few hacking tools, anyone Continue Reading →

Researchers at the University of California Riverside Bourns College of Engineering and the University of Michigan have identified a weakness they believe to exist across Android, Windows, and iOS operating systems that could allow malicious apps to obtain personal information. Although it was tested only on an Android phone, the team believes that the method Continue Reading →

A team of researchers from Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, has created a new kind of cyber attack where malicious code is able to be sent in parallel with a legitimate software download without modifying any code. The new attack binds the malware to free and open source software, because there are fewer code signing Continue Reading →