Based on name alone, the futuristic iris-scanning feature on the Galaxy S8 sounds like it would be the most secure way to lock your phone. Hacker Jan Krissler, who goes by the name Starbug, shows in a recent video that, despite the impressive technology in unlocking your phone with your eyes, the security system can be beaten with a relatively low-tech hack.

As the video shows, Starbug is able to take a infrared picture of a person’s face using the night mode setting on a regular point and shoot camera. Print it out on an ordinary laser printer and it fools the camera by placing a contact lens over the image to give it the appearance of an actual human eye.

The tech industry has a bad case of four-wheel fever, and it looks like there's no cure in sight. Before too long, it will be impossible to buy a new car without an embedded LTE modem—ostensibly there for our convenience, but with the side effect of creating a new revenue stream from monetized data.

And then there's the self-driving car gold rush. Anyone who's anyone in the tech or automotive worlds is working on an autonomous vehicle, a list that now includes Samsung. The company has been granted permission by the South Korean government to begin testing an autonomous vehicle on public roads.

Tech giants Apple, Samsung and Microsoft have broken their silence on the latest leak from WikiLeaks that revealed the CIA hacked into their products for surveillance purposes. Apple claimed to have previously addressed the vulnerabilities in their operating system, iOS, revealed in Tuesday’s ‘Vault 7’ leak from WikiLeaks.

“While our initial analysis indicates that many of the issues leaked today were already patched in the latest iOS, we will continue work to rapidly address any identified vulnerabilities,” the company said in a statement, urging customers to update to the latest version of iOS to ensure they have the most recent security updates.

A security researcher has discovered limitations in Samsung Pay's security, which, if exploited by an attacker, could be used in another phone to allow someone else to fraudulently make payments.

The magnetic-based contactless payment system, which comes standard in many newer Samsung phones, works by translating credit card data into tokens so that a hacker can't grab credit card numbers from the device. But those tokens aren't as secure as one might hope. Expert explained that the tokenization process gets weaker after the app generates the first token from a specific card, meaning that there's a greater chance that future tokens could be predicted.

Two security researchers, Roberto Paleari and Aristide Fattori, have revealed the technical details of an exploit they've discovered in Samsung Galaxy devices that allows an unauthorized third-party to start calls or send SMS texts from locked devices.

According to a technical write-up published on GitHub two days ago, an attacker that has temporary access or has stolen a Samsung Galaxy device, can connect it via USB to a Linux workstation and send malicious commands that initiate hidden calls and send SMS messages. This trick works without leveraging any software vulnerability, and even if the phone has USB debugging or USB tethering turned off.

Samsung laptop owners are being urged to update their Windows PCs after the discovery of a vulnerability that can allow remote attackers to download files onto a targeted system and gain complete control over the laptop.

The flaw is tied to a feature called “Samsung SW Update Tool 2.2.5.16” designed keep Samsung laptop users’ drivers and software up to date. “This vulnerability could be considered as a medium or low threat to most Samsung laptop users,” said Joaquín Varela, senior security researcher from Core Security CoreLabs Team, who discovered the Samsung vulnerability.

Most of today's top mobile payment apps are not protected enough to handle the amount of scrutiny and effort cyber-criminals are normally willing to put into compromising payment systems.

The company studied ten of the most popular mobile payment apps, ranging from mobile wallet apps to one-click payment merchants, and from peer-to-peer payment apps to regular apps that link themselves to banking accounts. According to Bluebox, three big issues were identified. The first is related to improperly protected communication channels that would allow attackers to redirect payments to an attacker's desired location.

Months before its technology became the centerpiece of Samsung’s new mobile payment system, LoopPay, a small Massachusetts subsidiary of the South Korean electronics giant, was the target of a sophisticated attack by a group of government-affiliated Chinese hackers.

As early as March, the hackers — alternatively known as the Codoso Group or Sunshock Group by those who track them — had breached the computer network of LoopPay, a start-up in Burlington, Mass., that was acquired by Samsung in February for more than $250 million, according to several people briefed on the still-unfolding investigation, as well as Samsung and LoopPay executives.

Google’s Project Loon has brought the concept of beaming wireless Internet from the sky into industry discourse, and now Samsung considers using thousands of satellites to connect the two-thirds of humanity without access.

Samung’s president of research and development laid out the premise in a research paper. The low-Earth orbit satellites could provide mobile data capacity equivalent to 200 gigabytes per month for 5 billion users around the globe; each satellite would be capable of providing terabit per second data rates “with signal latencies better than or equal to ground based systems.” So where does all that capacity come from?

Android is well known for its seemingly never-ending customization options and its permissive rooting credentials among other things. Distributions that cannot be modified to enable elevated permissions are quite rare, as enthusiasts seek to have virtually every possible feature available at their disposal.

But should you pursue that path? Does root provide what you need, or what you think you need? There are a couple of good reasons why you probably should root Android, but root is not for everyone, as the risks can far outweigh the benefits and you are likely to regret your decision once things get messy. So here is why you should not do it.