Google wants to kill passwords. And the weapon it wants to use is called Project Abacus, which Google said will become available on Android devices by the end of 2016. The way Project Abacus works is that instead of relying on passwords or two-factor authentication to open your Android phone, your device will instead authenticate...

Google clarified this week exactly when it plans to disable support for the RC4 stream cipher and the SSLv3 protocol on the company’s SMTP servers and Gmail’s web servers. It turns out the end will come sooner than later; the company announced it will begin to disable both a month from now, on June 16....

Google beefed up the way it displays Safe Browsing Alerts for Network Administrators this week, adding information about sites peddling unwanted and malicious software as well as those caught carrying out social engineering attacks. Google debuted the service, which notifies network admins after observing potentially damaging URLs on their networks, in 2010. Going forward, administrators...

Researchers warn hundreds of popular Firefox browser extensions are vulnerable to attack that could give hackers control of Mac OS X and Windows computers. Researchers from Northeastern University say the flaw is tied to Firefox’s support for an older browser extension platform and the Mozilla Foundation’s plug-in vetting process for its Firefox browser. Researchers presented...

Google pushed out the latest version of Chrome Thursday afternoon, fixing five issues, four of them critical. The update remedies an out-of-bounds read in Chrome’s open source JavaScript engine V8, two use-after-free vulnerabilities – one in Navigation and one in Extensions – and a buffer overflow in the libANGLE library. The V8 vulnerability fetched Wen...

In the end, it was a nail-biter pitting Tencent Security Team Sniper (KeenLab and PC Manager) against JungHoon Lee (lokihardt) for the title of Master of Pwn for Pwn2Own 2016. After a tense last two minutes of the competition, it was Tencent Security Team Sniper and its successful code execution of a vulnerability in Microsoft’s...

Google pushed out the latest version of its flagship browser Chrome on Tuesday, fixing three high severity bugs in the process. The update graduates the browser to version number 49.0.2623.87 for Windows, Mac, and Linux, according to a post on Google’s Chrome Releases blog this week. Two of the bugs, a type confusion vulnerability and...

Google yesterday released an update for the Chrome browser that patches seven vulnerabilities and also updates Adobe Flash Player. It also announced that Google Safe Browsing has been extended to Chrome for Android. The Chrome browser update is the second in less than a week; on Dec 1, Chrome 47 was released and 41 vulnerabilities...