Nobody’s saying that adblockers cooked up for the newly adblocker-amenable iOS 9 Safari browser were monitoring encrypted traffic, including, say, bank login details or private emails. But they could, given that some of those apps installed root certificates that allowed them to carry out deep packet inspection in order to filter out ads. Given the...

Imagine you’re the CTO of a company in the red-hot market of ride-sharing. One day, you read some very interesting news: it seems that a cyber intruder got their hands on a login key belonging to your biggest rival and used it to access an internal database to download the records of its drivers. It...

The Obama administration won’t seek legislation to force technology companies to decrypt communications, FBI Director James Comey told Congress in a public hearing on Thursday. Instead, it looks like the stalemate in the crypto-wars will continue on as is – technology companies and their allies and the federal government will keep trying to persuade each other (and the...

Hopefully you’ve never had anything stolen in a data breach, but if you have I hope you’ve been spared the salted wound of the non-apology. There are notable exceptions of course but as data leaks and network breaches get larger, more common and more damaging, a humble sorry seems to be the hardest word. All too often...

Over the years, users have clamored for a Facebook “Dislike” button. Now, finally, we know how Facebook feels about the request. Facebook Loves it with a big red heart. Or finds it Funny, with squinty-eyed, open-mouthed, laughing mirth. Or Facebook finds the requests Surprising with open-mouthed “Wow!-ness”, or with one-tear-rolling down the cheek Sadness, or...

We might well think we’re properly erasing data from gadgets before we sell them or dump them, but in fact we’re leaving smears of personal data lingering that can lead to identity theft. According to a recent analysis of 122 second-hand mobile phones, flash drives and mechanical hard drives – bought from eBay, Amazon.com and...

A journalist was found guilty by a California jury yesterday for conspiring with members of the hacker group Anonymous to alter the website of his former employer. Matthew Keys was convicted after an eight-day trial in which the jury heard about how Keys used an internet chat relay forum to recruit hackers into his scheme. Keys provided...

The “pocket dial” or “butt dial” happens to a lot of us. By constantly checking our phones dozens of times a day, it’s bound to happen. But it’s not just embarrassing or awkward. Butt dialing can have some serious consequences, too. We’ve heard at least a few stories of crooks accidentally butt dialing 911 and incriminating themselves...

How do you put a price on the value of photos lost when a thief nicks your phone? You don’t, at least not in terms of pounds sterling or dollars. But new sentencing guidelines published by the UK’s sentencing council will ensure that when it comes the time to determine how to sentence thieves, more...

Remember Stagefright? It was a security hole, or more accurately a cluster of holes, in Android’s core media-handling library, known as libstagefright. The official name of the buggy library quickly morphed into the media-friendly moniker of the bugs themselves, Stagefright. In operating system terms, a “library” (usually known as a DLL, or dynamic link library,...