FTC Shuts Down Fake Charity Phone Scam
Phone fraud comes in many forms, as most crimes do, and it’s not always obvious that a particular version is actually a crime. The FTC has just shut down a company that was running a specific kind of phone fraud scam that involved pressuring victims to make donations to a fake charity for disabled people […]
On the Wire Podcast: Rich Mogull on Apple Differential Privacy
Apple this week announced a new system called differential privacy that it will be implementing in many of its products in the coming months. The system is designed to allow for the collection of user data without being able to tie any of it back to specific users. But it’s more complicated and nuanced than […]
Apple Upgrades Security for iOS and MacOS
While much of the attention has focused on the differential privacy announcement Apple made during its Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this week, The company also made some important security changes to both iOS and OS X that are designed to provide some long-term protections for users. The security upgrades are not as splashy as the privacy […]
Apple Thinks Different on Privacy
Privacy means different things to different people and organizations, and no company is as invested in being different as Apple is. Now, Apple is making a dramatic change to the way it handles user data from a privacy perspective with its plan to employ a strategy known as differential privacy. The theory behind differential privacy relies […]
What’s on TV Tonight? Ransomware
Security researchers have discovered a variant of the FLocker Android ransomware that not only infects mobile devices, but also can infect smart TVs running certain versions of the operating system. The FLocker ransomware has been active for more than a year now, and it is many ways a typical piece of mobile ransomware. It is […]
BlackBerry Messenger Decryption Tactic Could Be Revealed
A decision in a years-old Canadian murder case that involved the police intercepting and decrypting more than a million encrypted BBM messages could reveal the technique that law enforcement used to get those encrypted messages. The case centers on a murder in Montreal several years ago of an alleged Mafia member. During the investigation, the […]
Researchers Release Master Decryption Tool for TeslaCrypt
The attackers behind the TeslaCrypt ransomware pulled up stakes and released the master decryption key for their creations, and now security researchers with Cisco’s TALOS team have published a tool that will decrypt files encrypted with any version of TeslaCrypt. The TeslaCrypt ransomware isn’t the most well-known or the nastiest of the variants that have […]
32 Million Twitter Credentials Dumped Online
A massive cache of credentials and email addresses associated with Twitter accounts has been posted for sale online, but Twitter officials say the information did not come from a breach of the company’s network. The database of more than 32 million passwords and email addresses–including many plaintext passwords–was offered for sale on an underground forum […]
Canadian University Pays $15K in Ransomware Attack
A ransomware attack has cost a university in Canada more than $15,000, after the school’s network was compromised and brought to a near standstill. The University of Calgary said it was hit by the ransomware attack about 10 days ago and many portions of the college’s network were affected. The IT department has been working […]