The US Senate isn't very interested in our privacy. Yesterday, our elected representatives voted 50 to 48 to overturn rules set in place in October of last year that would've required ISPs to obtain our permission before selling our data to advertisers or anyone else. The vote was entirely along party lines. "Every American should be alarmed by the very real violation of privacy that...
Once upon a time, we talked on the phone in a scant few spaces. The home, the office, and the relative safety of phone booths. These days, a call can come in anywhere, and while it might not always be considered good manners to take the call, sometimes you can't get around it. The just-announced gadget Hushme wants to solve that problem, but I'm not sure it's going to catch on. The...
If you needed yet another reminder not to install untrusted applications without fully knowing where they come from, here it is: researchers with Check Point Software Technologies recently published details on new Android malware named “Gooligan” that has compromised more than 1 million Google Accounts. Check Point said that figure is increasing by an additional 13,000 accounts as users...
Apple certainly loved the press it received when the FBI very publicly wasn't initially able to break into an iPhone owned by one of the San Bernardino shooters. The fact that the FBI had to pay security professionals to crack in suggested that Apple's security is tight, locked down from all prying eyes. On Thursday, however, The Intercept cited a security firm that says Apple is...
We're under attack from the Internet of Things.
It might sound fresh out of the pages of Orwell's 1984, but it's not. Bloomberg recently published a lengthy and revealing article about the Baltimore Police Department's surveillance operations, which employ an aircraft equipped with up to 6 commercial cameras to watch citizens below. The project has been hidden from the public. Since January, the Baltimore Police Department has...
Researchers from security firm Bastille have found that millions of cheap keyboards are susceptible to an attack called Keysniffer, which allows hackers to not only inject keystrokes onto your machine but read what you type, too. Keysniffer apparently affects accessories that use a less secure, radio-based communication protocol rather than a Bluetooth connection. Some of the...
New data provided to The Intercept by Edward Snowden shows that the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had a secret initiative with a single goal: to hack into Apple's iOS-powered devices for snooping on end users. Details of the CIA's campaign were provided through leaked paperwork from an intelligence conference called "Trusted Computing Base Jamboree," held in Virginia...
New information provided to The Intercept by Edward Snowden suggests that SIM cards used on carriers around the globe were compromised during a hack by the spies working for the NSA in the U.S. and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the U.K. Snowden told the news outlet that spies working on behalf of both agencies hacked into a database owned by Gemalto, a major SIM...
Russian security researchers from Kaspersky Lab claim the NSA has found a way to hide spying software deep inside hard drives, giving the agency free reign to eavesdrop on your computer activity. Kaspersky alleges the “closely guarded” ability is part of a larger spying conspiracy originating from Western cyberespionage operations—dubbed “the Equation group”—which is targeting...