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...

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...

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...

We come across a lot of spams, scams and phishing attempts here at Naked Security. Some come to our “send us a comment” email address, because it’s widely publicised. Some come to our personal addresses, especially those of us who have had the same email for many years. And many – the most interesting! – are reported...

It’s about six weeks since we first wrote about XcodeGhost. That’s the Apple Mac malware that was specially created by crooks in China to create iOS malware. You read that correctly. Just as the infamous Stuxnet virus tried to infect PCs with the ultimate goal (allegedly) of indirectly infecting uranium centrifuge controllers, so XcodeGhost aims...

Mobile apps are regularly leaking information to third parties, according to research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard, and Carnegie-Mellon. The researchers tested 110 popular, free apps – half of them Android and half iOS – to find out which ones share personal, behavioral, and location data with third-party websites. Make that very...

The unflappable and suave James Bond is known for impeccable taste in clothes, cars and cocktails. The Bond brand has been attractive to luxury goods companies including car makers Aston Martin and Jaguar, which produced special editions for the latest film in the franchise, “Spectre.” Sony even made a Bond Edition smartphone, the Xperia Z5, complete...