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...

Personal assistants on smartphones – Siri on the iPhone, Google Now on Androids, and Cortana on Windows Phone – allow us to do a lot of things with only a voice command. We can make calls, send text messages, do web searches, and much more. But what if someone else could make your phone do...

We already know that Android handset makers don’t always deliver security updates in a timely way – Google has only recently started issuing regular security updates for its own Nexus devices. But the number of unsecure Android devices out there is truly astonishing, according to research from the UK’s University of Cambridge – 87% of...

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...

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,...

Watch out, iDevice owners! Siri has opened the pod bay door to let snoopers in. Barely a week after the release of iOS 9, a hacker has found a way for snoops to access your contacts and photos and send messages without your passcode. The bug affects iOS 9 and iOS 9.0.1 on iPhones, iPads and iPods....

Google pushed out its first-ever monthly security update for Android in August, fixing the Stagefright vulnerability that an attacker could use to own your device with a malicious MMS message. Nexus devices got their September security update last week, fixing another eight vulnerabilities, including one that could allow an attacker to bypass the lockscreen and access...

The Android vulnerability known as Stagefright is back in the limelight. Stagefright is a bug, or more accurately a series of similar bugs, in an Android programming library called libstagefright. Libstagefright is part of the operating system that handles media files such as movies. If you receive an MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) message that links...