In a briefing filed on Monday in a New York court, Apple said it would be “impossible” to access the data stored on the majority of locked iPhones. Responding to Judge James Orenstein – who wanted help in deciding whether to fulfil a US Justice Department request that would see the company forced to aid the authorities...

If you’ve ever wondered how device manufacturers like Samsung or LG know how to build their Android smartphones to support new versions of the OS, here’s your answer: an obscure document called the Android Compatibility Definition. The document lays out all of the specifications for hardware and software compatibility, from device configurations, memory and power usage...

On the one hand, CWA (“Crackas With Attitude”), may have been a duo of pot-smoking, pro-Palestine 13-year-olds who socially engineered Verizon and got it to reset CIA Director John Brennan’s AOL address. They might then have posted taxpayer and other personal information of more than a dozen top US intelligence officials, plus a government letter...

A former federal agent who lined his pockets with bitcoins extorted from the black market site Silk Road has been sentenced to 78 months – more than 6 years – in prison. Former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Carl Force agreed, in June, to plead guilty to squeezing what was then valued at around $50,000...

Over on the Sophos Blog, we’ve just published the first article in a new series called What is…. We thought you might like it, so we decided to tell you about it here on Naked Security. The What is… articles take a technical subject – one that’s often name-dropped as if everyone, including the writer,...

It’s Week 4 of Cybersecurity Awareness Month (CSAM), and this week’s #CyberAware theme is Your Evolving Digital Life. As the CSAM organisers put it, the idea is to highlight: The "smart world" we live in and the importance of educating all citizens on cybersecurity as more and more of the devices we use – from...

Facebook has announced that it will notify users it suspects are being targeted by nation states and urge them to take extra security precautions. Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer, explained the new notifications in a 16 October blog post, saying users will only receive the warnings if Facebook has strong evidence suggesting they are...

Online retail giant Amazon has filed a lawsuit against more than 1100 people it says posted fake reviews on its website. The company is suing 1114 defendants – all named as “John Does” because it has yet to uncover their real identities – over a breach of its review policy that prohibits paid-for or fictional reviews. In a...

Love it or hate it, if you’re an Anglophone, you’ve probably heard of it. The UK’s Daily Mail, or, more precisely, the web-based Mail Online, is said to be the world’s busiest English-language news site. Despite its British origins, and its UK flavour, 70% of its traffic is said to come from outside the British...

For the third year running Mozilla’s ‘browser wars’ veteran, Firefox, has burned the world’s favourite browser, Google Chrome, in our trustworthy browser poll. Surprisingly, it also soundly beat the newest entrant to appear in our poll – the post-Snowden privacy poster boy, the Tor browser. The Tor browser, which uses Firefox as its base, is designed to be...