A Northern Ireland man has been handed a four-year jail term for running a series of very lucrative piracy streaming websites – including BedroomMedia.com and FastPassTV – from his bedroom, in Carnhill, Derry. According to the Derry Journal, “social recluse” Paul Mahoney, admitted to being responsible for a “highly sophisticated fraud” that netted him almost...

The law enforcement community has been warning technology companies that encryption in their products could let criminals and terrorists off the hook, with little evidence to support that claim. It turns out those warnings – from top law enforcers like FBI Director James Comey and former US Attorney General Eric Holder, and some elected officials in...

Microsoft will appear in a federal appeals court today to argue against the US government’s assertion that companies operating in the land of the free must hand over data stored in other countries when presented with a valid search warrant. The case in question, which began two years ago, surrounds emails stored on Microsoft servers in Dublin,...

Self-driving cars may be the future of transportation – it’s possible that eventually they could be safer than vehicles with human drivers. But autonomous vehicles are going to need more and better defenses against the threat of hackers and cyberattacks. Uber has just hired a pair of renowned car hackers to help the alternative cab company develop security...

This week has already been a roller coaster ride for ad-block users – between Apple promising to open the flood gates to ad-blocking in the Safari browser on upcoming iPhones and iPads, and Chrome users groaning after it looked like Google was cutting the knees off AdBlock and forcing them to sit through video ads...

Oh, the non-humanity! First it was the makers of a dog-like robot (named Spot!) who upset animal lovers by kicking it to show how it self-stabilizes. Then there was the barbaric smashing of hitchBOT, the smiling, privacy-invading, hitchhiking robot that proved that defenseless robots can’t trust humans (though many carbon-based life forms do show ample...

Do you keep databases with information about other people? Do you allow teleworkers, road warriors, suppliers, contractors and so on to connect in remotely? Do you accept payments, for example from credit cards or NFC devices? Do you make payments of your own online? Do you keep important business or personal data – tax returns,...

Thanks to Gabor Szappanos of SophosLabs for his behind-the-scenes work on this article. SophosLabs has drawn our attention to a new wave of malware attacks using a recent security bug in Microsoft Word. The bug, known as CVE-2015-1641, was patched by Microsoft back in April 2015 in security bulletin MS15-033. The vulnerability was declared to...

There’s been quite a buzz in the media lately about Twitter geolocation. Alfredo Guzmán, the son of fugitive Mexican drug baron Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán, is quite a big Twitter user, with nearly 10,000 tweets to his name and more than 160,000 followers. Sometimes his tweets show a location, and sometimes they don’t. In the...

A Latvian programmer pleaded guilty on Friday, 4 September 2015, to writing malware that infected more than a million computers around the world, leading to tens of millions of dollars in losses. Standing before a Manhattan federal court, Deniss Calovskis, 30, admitted conspiring to commit computer intrusion. His plea marks the beginning of the end of a story that...