Yandex and Facebook had a notable run-in last year when a team of developers from the Russian search giant created a social search app called Wonder, which Facebook promptly blocked, leading to it shutting down.
But in reality the two sides have been working together since 2010, and today comes the latest chapter in the collaboration. Yandex is launching a social search feature that will serve Yandex visitors related, real-time public posts from Facebook alongside other search results. Yandex, which accounts for around 60% of all searches in Russia, will also use Facebook firehose data to help provide more relevant results.
Read moreThe trail that led American officials to blame North Korea for the destructive cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment winds back to 2010, when the National Security Agency scrambled to break into the computer systems of a country considered one of the most impenetrable targets on earth.
Spurred by growing concern about North Korea’s maturing capabilities, the American spy agency drilled into the Chinese networks that connect North Korea to the outside world, picked through connections in Malaysia favored by North Korean hackers and penetrated directly into the North with the help of South Korea and other American allies.
Read moreThe first ever publicly known OS X firmware bootkit emerged out of the 31st Chaos Computer Club conference in Hamburg, Germany last month. Security researcher developed the attack and named it Thunderstrike.
In fact, the vulnerability underlies the operating system altogether. Hudson contacted Apple and they reportedly resolved the issue in all affected devices except the MacBook. There is no room for doubt here: Thunderstrike, like all boot- and rootkits, is a nasty threat that can wrest control over everything you do on your computer. You can think of it as the Ebola of computer threats.
Read moreA new patent filing describes using the cloud to transfer your Touch ID fingerprint data to other devices. Would such a system be safe and secure? Apple has envisioned a technology that would sync your Touch ID data with other mobile devices, as well as point-of-sale systems, via iCloud.
The sensor requires your fingerprint to access the device and to make purchases using the Apple Pay payments system. Setting up Touch ID is a matter of registering one or more fingerprints on your device. Why would Apple propose a cloud-based system for this process? How would this proposed syncing technology safeguard your Touch ID data?
Read moreElon Musk is worried that AI will destroy humanity, and so he's decided to donate money toward research into how we can keep artificial intelligence safe. The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has previously expressed concern that something like what happens in The Terminator could happen in real life.
He's also said that AI is "potentially more dangerous than nukes." The purpose of this donation is to both prevent that from happening and to ensure that AI is used for good and to benefit humanity. The money will be distributed to researchers through grant competitions, with the application process beginning.
Read moreHackers have targeted French websites since a rampage by Islamic terrorists left 20 dead last week, a top French cyberdefense official said as the president tried to calm the nation's inflamed religious tensions.
France is on edge since the attacks, which began at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. The paper, repeatedly threatened for its caricatures of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad, buried several of its slain staff members even as it reprinted another weekly issue with Muhammad on its cover. Calling it an unprecedented surge head of cyberdefense for the French military said a lot of French websites faced cyberattacks in recent days.
Read moreOver the past few months, AdaptiveMobile has tracked an increase of spam complexity on messaging apps, such as WhatsApp, in the United States, Europe and India, and expects these attacks to continue through 2015.
These campaigns have methodologies and content similar to SMS messaging abuse threats, providing evidence that the criminal groups are now also targeting messaging apps as service providers have succeeded in reducing levels of SMS spam. In particular, criminals are using WhatsApp to target users with text spam. Recent campaigns targeting WhatsApp users include investment spam messages sent from United States numbers to Europe.
An online advertising clearinghouse relied on by Google, Yahoo and Facebook is using controversial cookies that come back from the dead to track the web surfing of Verizon customers.
The company is taking advantage of a hidden un-deletable number that Verizon uses to monitor customers’ habits on their smartphones and tablets. It uses the Verizon number to re-spawn tracking cookies that users have deleted.The company’s zombie cookie comes amid a controversy about a new form of tracking the telecom industry has deployed to shadow mobile phone users.
Read moreBotnets first came into the consciousness of most of the general public in early 2000 when a Canadian teenager launched a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks against several high-profile Web sites.
The teen, who used the handle Mafiaboy, targeted Yahoo, ETrade, Dell, eBay, Amazon and other sites over the course of several days, flooding the sites with massive amounts of junk traffic until their servers crashed. Although Mafiaboy didn’t use a botnet to launch his attacks, security experts warned in the aftermath of the episode that botnets – large networks of PCs infected with a specific kind of malware – and the DDoS attacks they’re used for.
Read moreLockheed Martin recently announced that it is making real progress towards developing a compact nuclear fusion reactor capable of providing unimaginably vast supplies of energy, in exchange for a couple handfuls of clean, somewhat easily available fuel.
And yet, we’re still stuck memorizing ever-longer lists of passwords like it’s 1999. If we’re going to rely on an ancient authenticator for future technology, then we might as well come up with a solid way to remember our passwords. Unfortunately, it turns out that remembering long lists of complicated passwords requires us to do something that no one likes: study.
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