A six-week public standoff between Apple and the FBI ended today when the Department of Justice said it had accessed encrypted data stored on the San Bernardino terrorist’s iPhone. The DOJ said in its motion that it no longer needed Apple’s help as mandated in a Feb. 16 court order and asked that the order...

Mike Mimoso and Chris Brook recap the week in news, including how the FBI vacated Tuesday’s Apple hearing, a crypto iMessage bug that was patched, and the latest hospital to be hit by the ransomware Locky. The two also preview Badlock and what, if any, implications this week’s announcement may have. Download: Threatpost_News_Wrap_March_25_2016.mp3 Music by Chris...

System Integrity Protection (SIP) was implemented in OS X El Capitan and imposes limitations on what actions that Mac computers’ root accounts can take against protected paths of the operating system. Yesterday at the SysCan360 conference in Singapore, a researcher from SentinelOne disclosed details of a vulnerability that was patched by Apple this week only...

While the iMessage crypto bug got most of the attention among this week’s Apple patches, another vulnerability that was addressed represents a nasty trend of privilege escalation flaws that merit watching. Researchers at Cisco on Wednesday disclosed details on a flaw in an OS X graphics kernel driver that begs to be chained with any number of...

Threatpost Editor in Chief Mike Mimoso talks to crypto pioneer and security expert Bruce Schneier of Resilient Systems about the early days of the RSA Conference, the integration of privacy and security, and the current FBI-Apple debate over encryption and surveillance. [embedded content]

The FBI’s motion for a continuance in its case against Apple has opened a new avenue in this debate as to the identity and means by which the mystery “outside party” could unlock terrorist Syed Farook’s iPhone. Late yesterday afternoon, the FBI filed a motion to vacate a hearing scheduled for today in a Riverside,...

In addition to fixing the serious crypto vulnerabilities in iMessage that surfaced yesterday, Apple also deployed patches for nearly all of its products, including Safari, OS X, iOS, Apple TV’s tvOS, and watchOS. The iOS update, 9.3, is arguably the most pressing given the cryptographic issue dug up by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, but it...

The FBI has dropped its case against Apple less than a day before a scheduled court hearing and showdown over its demands that Apple help unlock a terrorist’s iPhone. The government late Monday afternoon filed a motion to vacate its case, putting a halt to a saga that began in mid-February when a federal magistrate...

When Apple released its iOS Security Guide for public consumption, it was an unprecedented look inside the security architecture behind its products. For cryptographer and professor Matthew Green and a team of four Johns Hopkins University graduate students, it was a road map to understanding not only how secure Apple’s iMessage messaging application was, but...

Apple Safari and Adobe Flash have proved to be Pwn2Own 2016’s biggest punching bags so far—hackers took down both, earning $282,500 in prizes at the first day of the annual hacking challenge in Vancouver on Wednesday. There were four successful attempts, one partial, and one failed attempt at the competition, which is held in tandem with the...