Beleaguered taxi firm Uber has accidentally revealed the personal data of hundreds of its drivers, exposing names, social security numbers, pictures of drivers licenses, tax forms and other sensitive information. Initially spotted by one of its drivers on Tuesday evening, the leak was reported on a dedicated Uber message board as well as the far...

Nothing like the padlock icon showing in your browser window to put your mind at ease, eh? After all, that lock signifies that the site has a Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificate (TLS being the successor to Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL; it’s also referred to as SSL/TLS). The certificate authorities (CAs) that give out...

Nobody’s saying that adblockers cooked up for the newly adblocker-amenable iOS 9 Safari browser were monitoring encrypted traffic, including, say, bank login details or private emails. But they could, given that some of those apps installed root certificates that allowed them to carry out deep packet inspection in order to filter out ads. Given the...

Hopefully you’ve never had anything stolen in a data breach, but if you have I hope you’ve been spared the salted wound of the non-apology. There are notable exceptions of course but as data leaks and network breaches get larger, more common and more damaging, a humble sorry seems to be the hardest word. All too often...

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...

Wireless carrier T-Mobile is warning 15 million customers whose personal information was compromised in a data breach at credit reporting company Experian. In a bizarre twist of irony, those customers are currently being offered two years of free credit monitoring from ProtectMyID.com – a service owned and operated by Experian. The data breach, announced on Thursday, 1 October,...

Given that I’m a sucker for online quizzes, I’m aware of the fact that when I’m angry, the villain I most resemble is Voldemort. I also know that if an artist were to promise me a novelty passport that features my machine-drawn portrait, replete with my name and an official-looking red stamp just like a...

Passwords? On Post-its? How retro! How circa Prince Williams! You’d think we’d all know better, particularly after such memorable incidents as when passwords were left on sticky notes glued in the background during a TV interview – an interview concerning a cyber-attack, of course – broadcast live on the French TV channel TV5 Monde this...

Apple just released iOS 9.0.2. This new version claims to close the well-publicised Lock screen hole that lets anyone view and edit your contacts, send text messages, and rummage through your photos – without entering your passcode. If you had an iOS 9 or 9.0.1 device with Siri accessible from your lock screen, you were vulnerable...

Uber users this week have found themselves – or, at any rate, their accounts – magically whisked around the world to ride through the city streets of China. Below are a few tweets from those who’ve found that Chinese fraudsters had used the hacked accounts to take free trips. Kirby Bittner was one such: @Uber...