A sophisticated cyber-crime campaign is leaving millions of people vulnerable to having malware installed on their computers simply by visiting high profile websites.
The campaign is using the fast-growing method of 'malvertising' to spread a pernicious form of malware called ransomware, which encrypts all the files on the hard drive of a victim's computer, and if the victim doesn't pay a ransom by deadline, those files are lost forever. The researchers were even able to estimate how much money the criminals were earning on a daily basis as the ransoms are charged in bitcoin, meaning all payments are traceable via the public blockchain.
Read moreA secret and scrappy court battle that Yahoo launched to resist the NSA’s PRISM spy program came to an end in 2008 after the Feds threatened the internet giant with a massive $250,000 a day fine if it didn’t comply and a court ruled that Yahoo’s arguments for resisting had no merit.
The detail of the threat became public after 1,500 pages worth of documents were unsealed in the case, revealing new information about the aggressive battle the Feds fought to force the company to bow to its demands. Yahoo fought to unseal the case documents to provide better transparency about the government’s data collection programs.
Read moreMalicious advertisements have popped up on websites such as YouTube, Amazon and Yahoo, part of a sophisticated campaign to spread malware, Cisco said Monday.
When encountered, the malicious advertisements cause a person to be redirected to a different website, which triggers a download based on whether the computer is running Windows or Apple’s OS X, wrote Armin Pelkmann, a threat researcher. The network has been nicknamed Kyle and Stan due to those names appearing in subdomains of more than 700 websites the attackers have set up to distribute the malware, Pelkmann wrote.
Read moreGoogle’s handling of “right to be forgotten” requests from European citizens will come under fire from the continent’s privacy watchdogs on Thursday, after the search engine restricted the removal of Internet links to European sites only.
European data protection authorities are meeting representatives of Google, Microsoft, which operates the Bing search engine, and Yahoo to discuss the implementation of the landmark ruling from Europe’s top court upholding people’s right to request that outdated links be removed from Internet search results. European Union privacy watchdogs have several concerns on the way the ruling, which has pitted privacy advocates against free speech defenders, is being implemented, particularly by Google, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Read moreBlink, a mobile messaging application that lets users share self-destructing messages, has been acquired by Yahoo. The app competed in an increasingly crowded space alongside Snapchat, of course, but also newer entrants like Frankly, Confide, Wickr, and others. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
All seven Blink team members, including the founders, will now be joining Yahoo. Blink is a product of Meh Labs, a company founded by ex-Googler Kevin Stephens and Michelle Norgan. Originally, the startup had been focused on a location-based service called Kismet which grew popular around the time of SXSW 2012, when apps like Highlight and Banjo were starting to take off.
Read moreLAST year, I spent more than $2,200 and countless hours trying to protect my privacy. Some of the items I bought — a $230 service that encrypted my data in the Internet cloud; a $35 privacy filter to shield my laptop screen from coffee-shop voyeurs; and a $420 subscription to a portable Internet service to bypass untrusted connections — protect me from criminals and hackers. Other products, like a $5-a-month service that provides me with disposable email addresses and phone numbers, protect me against the legal (but, to me, unfair) mining and sale of my personal data.
In our data-saturated economy, privacy is becoming a luxury good. After all, as the saying goes, if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product. And currently, we aren’t paying for very much of our technology.
Read moreFacebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google on Monday began publishing details about the number of secret government requests for data they receive, hoping to show limited involvement in controversial U.S. surveillance efforts.
The tech industry has pushed for greater transparency on government data requests, seeking to shake off concerns about their involvement in vast, surreptitious surveillance programs revealed last summer by former spy contractor Edward Snowden. The government said last month it would relax rules restricting what details companies can disclose about Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court orders they receive for user information.
Read moreRepresentatives of Obama‘s Administration continue to insist that spying on Americans is not a violation of constitutional rights of citizens and carried out exclusively in the interests of national security.
However, Chris Kitts, the father of beforeitsnews.com, believes that the obtained information is used not only for security purposes.
According to Chris Kitts, Washington creates “The machine for the implementation blackmail. Now they have access to the emails of people who are in the data store in Utah.
Read moreDuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine, served over 1bn searches in 2013 after a huge surge in interest following the Snowden revelations. Until Edward Snowden's files detailing the extent of state surveillance, the search engine received around 1.5m queries per day. But in the weeks and months following the Guardian's publication of the NSA files, the number of users more than doubled.
By November, more than 4 million people were using the site every day, and on Tuesday 7 January the site had its biggest day so far, serving 4,452,957 queries in a 24-hour period. "Needless to say, it was a great year for us," DuckDuckGo said in a blogpost. "We're looking forward to similar greatness in 2014.
Read moreOver 2 million passwords for popular social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as Google and Yahoo accounts have been stolen and posted online, with Russian social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki also featuring on the hitlist.
Internet security firm Trustwave exposed the extensive data hoard, saying in its blog that the responsible botnet – dubbed Pony – had harvested information from thousands of vulnerable computers on a global scale.
The information included login credentials, email addresses and passwords. In total, 1,580,000 website login credentials were stolen, alongside 320,000 email and 41,000 FTP accounts.
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