There is much reporting in the news this week about the American government’s court order to force Apple to decrypt iPhone 5 belonging to the San Bernardino Islamic terrorists. The journalists report that Apple says that the iPhone is impossible to crack because Apple does not know the encryption ke
Mark Twain used to write for the 150 year old The Atlantic magazine. So did lots of other well-known writers. Now the staid old publication has written some cybersecurity news. The Atlantic is known, or was known, for publishing what is called the long-form-narrative article. That means long article
The EU and USA have reached an agreement on rules that the US government and US business must follow when “requesting or handling the data” of EU citizens. The agreement is agreed in principle while the regulations have yet to be written. The old agreement, called Safe Harbor, was ruled unconstituti
What is missing in the news coverage of major security hacks is how they work. This is because most newspaper readers and writers are not programmers. But a journalist should be able to explain such things in an easy-to-understand manner so that the ordinary person can understand how high-profile ha
FireEye has bought the cyberintelligence firm iSight for $200 million. They had previously bought the cybersecurity research and forensics firm Mandiant to built up their offering. The Wall Street Journal says one reason for the iSight acquisition is to try to prop up its sagging stock price which h
Brian Krebs is where we turn our attention today. This former Washington Post investigative reporter is not very technical, but he is plugged into cybercriminal news and is usually one of the first to uncover data breaches like the Target retailer attack that companies try to keep secret. This week
Stagefright is an Android vulnerability that some have called the worst Android security problem ever. A hacker can use this to gain root access to an Android device simply by calling a phone and sending it a specially constructed MP4 media file in an MMS (multimedia message). MMS messag
France, the country, and Anonymous, the hacktivists, have declared war on ISIS. President Obama has reluctantly done the same: in his Oval Office address on December 7th, the 74th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Obama used the word “war” for the first time in reference to c
One of the more common types of malware to threaten PC users over the last several years has been ransomware. Covered extensively on this blog, ransomware is malicious code that secretly encrypts the files and folders of an infected computer using state-of-the-art encryption techniques. Once encrypt
MySQL database servers, which millions of organizations worldwide rely on for backend database services, could soon be leveraged in massive DDoS attacks because of a dangerous malware variant known as Chikdos. Chikdos was first discovered by Polish cybersecurity experts over two years ago. Chikdos,