Hacking
The Chinese government has allegedly orchestrated a massive cyber attack into the iCloud accounts of its citizens. It seems that China has declared a war with Apple on privacy as the hacking coincided with the launching of the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus in the country last week.
Snapchat says it is adding new user privacy features after a holiday hack last week, when hackers exposed the private information of about 4.6 million Snapchat users. The young social media company also said it would beef up internal security to make it more difficult to get at account information, but noticeably offered no apologies.
If you didn't think Windows Vista was virus-prone enough, here's some news to convince you otherwise. Microsoft warned on Tuesday that the substandard Windows operating system is currently under attack from hackers who have found a zero day vulnerability.
The hack attack that Adobe announced early in October is actually considerably worse than originally thought. What was once believed to affect some three million customers' credit card data is now thought to have exposed the encrypted passwords of more than ten times as many customers.
Customer names, IDs, encrypted passwords and credit card numbers, and other important, personal information for millions of customers of the multimedia software company Adobe Systems Inc. has been purloined in an monumental hack of the company's corporate network. The hackers were able to access the source code of some of Adobe's most popular software as well.
You used to just have to worry about installing anti-virus software on your computer, and then you were safe (unless you had a Mac, then you were safe from the start). But as malicious hackers have gotten more clever - and, more importantly, as the internet seeps into our daily, physical lives with the emerging "internet of everything" - cybersecurity is going to play an increasing role in our lives. The most recent example is a vulnerable "smart toilet" in Japan. I hope the IT experts are ready for the future.
If you were freaked out by recent reports that the NSA had a program to track users on the internet, you will probably not like to know this: According to a recent Wall Street Journal report, the FBI has hacking tools that can spy on suspects using their smartphone and laptop microphones, among many other tools.
Researchers have effectively hacked a large yacht's Global Positioning System to lead it astray, while keeping the crew completely in the dark about its whereabouts.
One of the most ubiquitous pieces of cell phone hardware, the SIM card, is vulnerable to a hack attack that could put millions of people at risk for theft and being spied on. Hackers could carry out this attack "within two minutes on a standard computer."
A massive hole in the security of almost all Android systems has been exposed by a small cybersecurity research firm called Bluebox Labs. The bug, if exploited, could give hackers access to almost any Android phone, let them do almost anything with it, and could go unnoticed by the app store, the phone, and the phone's user.
Ubisoft is recommending that users change their account information due to a recent hack that accessed a number of usernames, email addresses, and encrypted passwords.
On the heels of reports from U.S. officials that Iranian hackers have gained a worrying amount of access to U.S. energy firms in an attempt to sabotage utility systems, comes new reports that Chinese cyberspies have compromised the system designs of a long list of important U.S. military assets.
Recent hacking news has been predominantly focused on security breaches at media companies, possibly coming from inside China, or influential Twitter accounts being hijacked - presenting varying levels of disruption, ranging from the trivial to the more serious- by the Syrian Electronic Army. But recent accounts from current and former U.S. officials describe even more potentially dangerous incoming cyberattacks, coming from Iran.
Twitter has finally enabled a two-step verification feature for Twitter users' accounts, though it's not automatic and needs to be manually enabled by users themselves.
A hacker has been sentenced to a year in prison for helping to break into the servers of Sony Pictures Entertainment. Cody Kretsinger, a member of the hacker collective LulzSec, pleaded guilty in April of 2012 to one count of conspiracy and one count of unauthorized impairment of a protect computer.
