Members of the loose hacker collective Anonymous followed through on a pledge to release the names of members of the Ku Klux Klan, but #OpKKK was flawed from the get-go by uncoordinated document dumps and smearing of innocent people who are in no way connected to the KKK. The plan for the op was to “unhood” 1000...

Swiss-based encrypted email provider ProtonMail – developed at the CERN research facility in 2013 to withstand surveillance by the world’s increasingly inquisitive intelligence agencies – has revealed that it handed over 15 bitcoins (about $6000/£4000) to stop a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. With the company’s main site still down, ProtonMail took to WordPress to explain...

We’ve written about ransomware a lot, because it’s such an odious and in-your-face sort of threat. Ironically, ransomware isn’t actually the most dangerous or insidious sort of malware. Ransomware crooks don’t steal your data covertly, or keep track of you via your webcam, or try to read your emails over an extended period for competitive...

If you’re an IT professional, you know better than anyone else about the concerns that go along with securing a business. Anything and everything from ransomware to phishing emails to lost smartphones – the list goes on and on. But of all the terrors that can plague your organization, which are your top concerns? We...

A woman who blabbed on Facebook about “dying from boredom” while serving on a jury has been slapped with a $1000 fine. Kimberly Ellis, of Queens, New York, was on a jury for a case about a 2014 robbery when she began making detail-filled posts, sometimes twice a day, from a courthouse in the Queens...

Drones: even if they sometimes crash into walls, spark fights in the prison yard or get snagged on barbed wire, they’re still more effective for smuggling contraband than cats. US prisons want to take them out. Drones, not cats. The Federal Bureau of Prisons on Wednesday put out a call for information on integrated systems...

What harm can a selfie do? How much do you really give away if you upload images that contain snippets of information unique to you? Just how much detail can a crook really make out in low-resolution mobile phone snapshot that’s uploaded to a social media site? And even if crooks could dig out all...

How many times does the word “wasted” show up in your social media profiles and posts? What?! You don’t know? Even if you’re not sure of the answer, if you are in the US, looking for credit, there’s now a chance that the companies who assess your creditworthiness will. If you’re planning to get a...

A US man from the state of Pennsylvania – who, evidently, doesn’t quite understand that police use computers and has never heard of Tor – is looking at 2 to 4 years in jail for trying to recruit a cybercriminal to erase his court records and wipe out $16,000 he owed in fines. He wanted...

First, the trick: on Halloween night, PageFair got hit by a Trojan masquerading as an Adobe Flash update. Then, the treat: the company managed to eschew non-apology mumbo-jumbo to issue a detailed, satisfyingly remorseful apology. Beginning late Sunday night, the day after the company discovered the attack, PageFair CEO Sean Blanchfield published a series of updated...