Was the Federal Bureau of Investigation justified in paying over $1.3 million for a hacking tool that opened the iPhone 5c of the San Bernardino shooter? For some in the security community the answer is a resounding yes. For others, the answer is not so clear-cut. FBI Director James Comey said on Thursday the agency...

Mike Mimoso and Chris Brook discuss the news of the week, including BlackBerry CEO’s stance on lawful access principles, the FBI/Apple hearing, Viber adding end-to-end crypto, Teslacrypt, and more. http://traffic.libsyn.com/digitalunderground/Threatpost_News_Wrap_April_22_2016.mp3 Download: Threatpost_News_Wrap_April_22_2016.mp3 Music by Chris Gonsalves

Messaging firm Viber is adding end-to-end encryption for 711 million of its users, becoming the latest tech firm to embrace encryption on an massive scale. Making the move even more provocative is the fact Viber is owned by a Japanese conglomerate and operates out of Israel – making it immune to existing and any upcoming U.S....

TeslaCrypt, like many of its ransomware cousins, doesn’t sleep on past success. Researchers at Endgame Inc., have found two updates for the cryptoransomware in the past two weeks that invest heavily in obfuscation and evasion techniques, and also target a host of new file extensions. These samples, researcher Amanda Rousseau told Threatpost, were found in...

Representatives from Apple and the FBI testified Tuesday at a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on the ongoing encryption debate. Both vowed to work cooperatively to move past the current encryption impasse and find common ground. They also used the hearing to clarify stances on encryption and set the record straight on the FBI’s use...

Cisco Talos said on Friday that 3.2 million servers are vulnerable to the JBoss flaw used as the initial point of compromise in the recent SamSam ransomware attacks. Worse, researchers said that thousands of servers have already been backdoored. Hardest hit have been K-12 schools running library management software published by Follett called Destiny, Cisco...

Microsoft’s lawsuit against the U.S. government for the right to tell its customers when a federal agency is looking at their emails is getting widespread support by privacy advocates. For many, Microsoft’s stance lends an important and powerful voice to ongoing efforts to reform the Electronic Communications Privacy Act that is at the heart of...

Civil liberty groups and tech firms are celebrating the defeat of a controversial California bill that would have forced phone makers to decrypt their devices by court order. The proposed legislation, AB 1681, died when lawmakers refused to give the bill a vote. But opponents of the bill, who argued Assembly Bill 1681 would undermine...

Menacing ransomware called Jigsaw threatened to delete thousands of files an hour if victims didn’t pay 0.4 Bitcoins or $150. Worse, restarting your PC, according to the attackers, would also cost victims 1,000 deleted files. The icing on the cake was a menacing image of “Billy the Puppet” from the horror movie franchise Saw and...

The Qbot malware is back and hard at work again with infections reported on 54,517 machines, according to researchers at BAE Systems—with 85 percent of those impacted systems residing in the United States. Qbot’s latest incarnation has learned new tricks since its early days in 2009, and is riling security professionals with its ability to evade...