If you were born in California since 1983, the state owns your DNA. The data of every Californian born since that year is kept in a bland office building in Richmond, a city located in the eastern section of the San Francisco Bay Area. That data’s not just passively kept, mind you: it’s also being...

Microsoft’s new plan to keep the US government’s hands off its customers’ data: Germany will be a safe harbor in the digital privacy storm. Microsoft on Wednesday announced that beginning in the second half of 2016, it will give foreign customers the option of keeping data in new European facilities that, at least in theory,...

A distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) is a cheap but effective way to take out your target’s website by flooding it with so much traffic that the web server becomes overwhelmed and the website crashes. There are those who use DDoS attacks as a kind of online protest, such as hacktivist groups like Anonymous. Then there...

US federal prosecutors, on Tuesday, unveiled criminal charges against three men accused of orchestrating the biggest theft of customer data from financial institutions in the country’s history – encompassing personal data belonging to more than 100 million people. Unsealing a 23-count indictment in Manhattan, the Justice Department charged Gery Shalon, Joshua Samuel Aaron and Ziv Orenstein with computer hacking...

Facebook’s testing a new feature for Messenger. Photo Magic – which sounds like something a costumed character at the Magic Kingdom would bestow with a twinkly wand – uses facial recognition to paw through your phone’s camera roll, ID your friends, and then nudge you to send photos to the people it spots. David Marcus, head...

Max Schrems must be pleased. He who rose up from the ranks of Facebook’s privacy-ravaged users to file complaints against what he said was Facebook’s illegal data collection/retention, and is now witnessing the fruits of his labor. Or, as he tweeted in response to the Belgian court giving Facebook 48 hours to stop tracking those without...

Comcast says it wasn’t hacked, but hundreds of thousands of its customers may have been, forcing the cable giant to reset passwords to email accounts of about 200,000 customers. The forced password reset came after an independent security researcher spotted an ad on a Dark Web marketplace offering 590,000 Comcast subscriber email addresses and plaintext passwords for $1000...