A controversial hacking company recently ran a competition offering $3m for up to three click-to-own exploits against Apple’s iOS. The exploits would be sold on to “eligible customers” only. The competition is now closed, but one exploit apparently met the grade and will earn $1,000,000. We investigate: what “click-to-own” means, why exploits of this sort...

If you’re one of those people who waits for the first update to an update before you install it… …and you’re also an OS X or an iOS user, then your number’s just been called. In a flurry of Security Advisories published this week [2015-10-21] by Apple, the following security-oriented updates were announced: OS X...

Get ready! We’re about to run the gauntlet of Mactivists, and we’d love you to join us. The story is a simple one: Apple released updates for iMovie and iWork this week (get ready for about 1GB of download in total), bumping up the middle digit of the products’ version numbers. Keynote on OS X,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

You’ve probably read all sorts of to-and-fro about Apple’s App Store this week. Until now, the App Store has been to the malware scene what the planet Earth was to Douglas Adams’s HHGttG: Mostly harmless. That changed a few days ago, when Palo Alto networks published a series of articles about malware that had shown...

Ads are larger and harder to dismiss on mobile, they slow down page loading with JavaScript, that in turn leads to burned battery power, they waste the cellular data that many of us have to pay for on a metered basis – and they can be used to deliver malware, exploits and fraud. How does...