The mob is turning against Flash. Mozilla has blocked every version of Adobe’s Flash plugin from running within its Firefox browser, while Facebook’s head of security has called for Adobe to kill it off.
The moves come following a series of vulnerabilities in Flash being actively exploited, including those exposed by the Hacking Team compromise. Firefox users seeking to view Flash-based content, such as videos, adverts or more complex web tools for uploading images and other actions, will need to click again and accept a warning that “Flash is known to be vulnerable. Use with caution”. That means users of Firefox cannot use Flash by default.
Read moreBitcoin Cloud Mining service Cloudminr.io has been hacked and its whole users database is on sale for 1 Bitcoin. The unknown hackers have successfully taken full control of the website's server and defaced the homepage of the website.
Users visiting the website are greeted with a defaced homepage showing the partial database of around 1000 clients including their usernames and unencrypted passwords in completely plain text format. This clearly indicates that the company is not following the best security practices to secure their users private data as the passwords were not even hashed before storing into the database.
Read moreHave you ever seen any mobile application working in the background silently even after you have uninstalled it completely? I have seen Google Photos app doing the same.
Your Android smartphone continues to upload your phone photos to Google servers without your knowledge, even if you have already uninstalled the Google Photos app from your device. Nashville Business Journal editor David Arnott found that Google Photos app uploaded all his personal photographs from the device into the service even after uninstalling it.
Read moreAbout a decade ago, spam brought email to near-ruin. The contest to save your inbox was on, with two of the world’s biggest tech companies vying for the title of top spam-killer. Microsoft boasted that its spam filters were removing all but 3 percent of the junk messages from Hotmail, the company’s online email service at the time.
Google responded by claiming that its service, Gmail, removed all but about one percent of spam messages, adding that its false positives rate was also about one percent. It was a point of pride for the two companies, particularly Microsoft, whose Hotmail service once carried such a poor reputation for spam.
Read moreEnormous technological changes in medicine and healthcare are heading our way. These trends have a variety of stakeholders: patients, medical professionals, researchers, medical students, and consumers. They are important because of the impact they will likely have on all of us at one time or another.
To get an overview of the trends in healthcare technology, we turned to Dr. Bertalan Meskó, medical futurist and author of The Guide to the Future of Medicine: Technology and the Human Touch. In it, he identifies several areas that he believes will shape the future of medicine and healthcare for decades to come. Meskó’s predictions easily fall into two categories.
Read moreTwo sister mobile and telecom service providers will pay a combined US$3.5 million after the U.S. Federal Communications Commission found that they were storing customers' personal data on unprotected servers accessible over the Internet.
TerraCom and YourTel America failed to adequately protect the personal information of customers. The customer information available online included names, addresses, and driver's licenses. Consumers rightly expect that companies will take every reasonable precaution to protect their personal information. After the reporter contacted the companies, they reported his investigation to the FCC as a data breach.
Read moreThe director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has warned US senators that the threat from the Islamic State merits a debate about limiting commercial encryption.
In a twin pair of appearances before the Senate’s judiciary and intelligence committees, Comey testified that Isis’s use of end-to-end encryption, whereby the messaging service being used to send information does not have access to the decryption keys of those who receive it, helped the group place a devil on the shoulders of potential recruits. Comey said that while the FBI is thus far disrupting Isis plots, “I cannot see me stopping these indefinitely”.
Read moreIf you were affected by recent hacks on US government databases, you're in good company. The federal government announced that the total number of people affected by cyberattacks on the US government's personnel office was more than 22 million.
The breadth of the attack exceeds some of the worst estimates that government officials and security experts had shot around in the past month, showing that the government's databases were an unsecured stockpile of valuable information when the attack occurred. It's the largest blemish on the government's record of controlling its systems, and follows a string of attacks.
Read moreESET researchers have discovered a new, ingenious, yet very simple Facebook phishing scheme: playable Android games that, before they are started, ask users to enter their Facebook credentials.
The researchers found two such games on Google Play. Unlike some other Android malware, these apps did contain legitimate functionality they actually were real games in addition to the fraud. Both apps were developed by the same individual, and have been available for download on Google Play for months. But obviously not all those who downloaded the apps and tried to play the games have fallen for the phishing scheme.
Read moreThe finance chief at Fortelus Capital Management LLP got an alarming phone call just as he was getting ready to leave work on a Friday. The caller said he was from Coutts, the London-based hedge fund’s bank, and warned there may have been fraudulent activity on the account.
Fortelus Chief Financial Officer Thomas Meston was reluctant, but agreed to use the bank’s smart card security system to generate codes for the caller to cancel 15 suspicious payments. When Meston logged on to the firm’s online bank account the following Monday, he saw that $1.2 million was gone. The incident shows how even the most sophisticated online security systems can fail because of human error.
Read moreAxarhöfði 14,
110 Reykjavik, Iceland