A Scottish citizen was indicted on Thursday by a federal grand jury in San Francisco for allegedly using Twitter to spread disinformation, causing the stock prices of two companies to plummet. The Department of Justice (DOJ) said that James Alan Craig, 62, of Dunragit, Scotland, allegedly set up Twitter accounts using names similar to real...

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...

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...

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...

Information about the data breach at UK telecom group TalkTalk has continued to drip out since the company announced a “cyberattack” on its website (on 22 October 2015). Yet, with every new piece of the puzzle, we seem to get no closer to the truth about what exactly happened, who was responsible, and what TalkTalk is doing to fix this...

Thanks to new and upcoming mobile apps, members of the public who feel they’ve been unfairly stopped or even harassed by the police won’t have to rely solely on police records or recordings to make their case. Instead, the apps enable you to monitor how stop and search is conducted, either of yourself or someone else, and helps...

The cameras of more than 100 automated license plate readers have been streaming live on the web, “often with totally open Web pages accessible by anyone with a browser,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said in a new report released last week. The EFF says it learned about the lack of security around these cameras...

This week, the White House unveiled a new strategy for modernizing the US government’s cybersecurity, and there’s a lot of work to be done. Last year, a US Senate report found the government’s cybersecurity to be shockingly bad; even computer systems at the US Department of Homeland Security, an agency with significant cybersecurity responsibilities, were found to have...