In what is a truly embarrassing event for America’s signal intelligence service, hackers got their hands on a massive set of hacking tools belonging to of the NSA. The hacking group, called the Shadow Brokers, put part of this online for free to show that it was genuine. Now they are selling the res
If computers get hacked because of weaknesses in the operating system then why not remove the operating system to make them more secure? That’s the simple principle behind ChromeOS, the open source operating system sponsored by Google. There is only one program on ChromeOS: that is the Chrome brow
There have been some high profile incidents of cell phone hacking some years ago. For example, the former Speaker of the House of Congress in the USA Newt Gingrich was hacked when an older married couple used a simple radio scanner to listen in on his calls. But you do not hear about such hack
The US has levelled the charge that the Russian government has hacked into the headquarters of the Democrat Party in the USA. They say the Russian goal was to steal political campaign data and give it to presidential candidate Donald Trump to help him against Hillary Clinton. The assertion is that
This week Microsoft was given a firm slap across the backside by the European Union for vacuuming up personal data with Windows 10 and showing ads on that platform. The company has 3 months to change their software to stop recording user data. But one wonders why the EU singled out Microsoft when G
WhatsApp, like Facebook, uses OpenSignal opensource to encrypt messages. It encrypts all chat messages and does not need to be turned on. Here we explain how that works. And we explain how it might be possible to compromise that security by copying a phone’s private key, although reasoning through
Facebook has rolled out encrypted chat now, shortly after WhatsApp having done the same. They call it Secret Conversations (SC). It is based on the opensource Signal protocol developed by Open Whisper Systems (OWS). OWS has their own encrypted chat app too, called Signal. It has some notable differ
Bart Ransomware is a new ransomware reported in the media only a few days ago. Proofpoint wrote a detailed technical analysis of it here. Like other ransomware, this sets the wallpaper to show the ransom message, then directs the user where they can pay the ransom to obtain the passcode to their fi
A couple of years ago thieves descended in large numbers on Chile to replace debit card readers in ATM machines with their own recording device to vacuum up stolen data. This type of crime is called skimming. They also installed tiny cameras in the ATMs to record the pin as users typed those in. T
This writer has been saying for years that security products do not work 100% of the time. So there is the need to use several different approaches to cybersecurity. Even if intrusion detection tools worked 99.99% of the time then all it would take is 9,999 tries for the probability of someone pene