In recent months, security researchers have pondered whether craftily designed malware could steal data from a computer using high-frequency signals when a network connection was not present. Take security researcher Dragos Ruiu, who claimed several months ago that a malware dubbed badBios could hijack a PC's microphone and speakers.
Not to be outdone by Apple's use of fingerprint scanning technology in the iPhone 5S, Samsung is mulling the possibility of including iris recognition technology in the next Galaxy S smartphone. That's one of the hints Samsung Exec Lee Young Hee dropped on Bloomberg in a recent interview at CES 2014.
Steam, Valve's PC gaming haven, was unavailable to users Friday morning after the site fell victim to a reported distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Two Twitter users claimed responsibility for Steam's service outages, saying they used a botnet to overwhelm Steam's servers with traffic.
Ads that hound you from site to site don't seem quite so heinous in the wake of Tuesday's browser cookie-based revelation. The National Security Agency is reportedly using a particular kind of tracking cookie from Google to identify and track potential hacking targets. The NSA is also grabbing location data from third-party advertisers delivering ads to mobile apps, according to The Washington Post.
In a bid to banish the overhyped Android malware scourge, AT&T will start preloading Lookout Antivirus and Security for Android on all Google-powered phones.
Is TrueCrypt audited yet? Nope, but it will be soon. One of the world's most-used file encryption tools is about to get a full exam that will hopefully give the software a clean bill of health, after an independent effort successfully raised tens of thousands of dollars to peer into TrueCrypt's deepest recesses.
Two encrypted communication service providers are turning to you for help in building the next-generation of secure email services. Lavabit founder Ladar Levison and Silent Circle recently began a Kickstarter initiative to help fund the development and roll out of the first Dark Mail clients.
3D printing promises a glorious future, one where you'll be able to create and manufacture nearly anything you can think of right from the comfort of your own home. But the future potential of 3D printing isn't limited by your imagination alone: The law is tossing up barriers for the nascent technology.
Rip out your computer's microphone and webcam, turn off your Bluetooth, and put on your tinfoil hats, it's "super amazing crazy security storytime."
Recent headlines about shadowy government agencies, high-profile hack attacks, and your face in Google ads drive home a crucial point: Your online privacy is best protected when you keep an iron grip on the information you're handing out. If your info is on a server somewhere, it's not truly yours.
A VPN provider based in California has decided to shutter its privacy-conscious service rather than hand over its encryption keys to the U.S. government. This continues what can only be described as a chilling effect stemming from the government's aggressive moves to monitor online communications.
The revamped Yahoo Mail sure is pretty, but from a security perspective the popular service has a pretty ugly security flaw: It doesn't encrypt your email sessions. But that will soon change. (Finally!) Yahoo plans to roll out default SSL connections to all email accounts beginning January 8, 2014, the company announced Monday.
Secure email provider Lavabit is coming back from the dead for a brief time to give users a chance to recover their data, after abruptly shutting its doors in August to protest what the company considered intrusive data requests from the U.S. government.
Keeping your mobile gear secure while you're zipping across the grid is tricky business. Laptops and tablets--veritable gold mines of personal information--are popular targets for thieves. Law enforcement officials, meanwhile, could confiscate your smartphone and then examine the data--merely as a result of a routine traffic stop.
The Web is a wild place, with more than the NSA potentially out to get you. With the so-called six strikes antipiracy initiative in full effect, you never know if Hollywood is monitoring your peer-to-peer activity. Then there are the malicious hackers trying to reset email, Facebook, and Twitter passwords.