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What We Know So Far: Apple and the FBI

The public back-and-forth between the FBI and Apple over the company’s refusal to create a custom version of iOS that would let the FBI access encrypted data on an iPhone belonging to one of the shooters in the San Bernardino massacre has produced a huge amount of rhetoric and confusion. The technical details of what […]

Xbot Android Ransomware Can Steal Bank Info, Encrypt Devices

There’s a new Android Trojan circulating that has the ability to not only steal victims’ banking credentials and texts from banks, but also can lock infected devices, encrypt their contents, and hold them for ransom. The Xbot malware is part of the growing sector of mobile ransomware, a threat that has plagued desktops for years. […]

Owning VOIP Phones With Zero Clicks

Researchers have uncovered a simple method for compromising some common VOIP phones, enabling them to listen to victims’ calls covertly or use the phones to make expensive or fraudulent calls. The attack takes advantage of the fact that the affected phones don’t have any authentication set up by default, but do have a vulnerability that […]

Google Data Shows Dangers of Third-Party App Stores

TENERIFE–Google’s position in the Internet world is a unique one. In one or another, the company controls or sees much of the traffic on the network and owns one of the larger computing arsenals on the planet. It’s also in control of a decent chunk of the mobile world, thanks to Android’s popularity, and securing […]

Time is Now For an IoT Security Development Lifecycle

TENERIFE–Microsoft engineers, executives, and developers have spent much of the past decade spreading the gospel of the security development lifecycle (SDL), trying to convert people and organizations to the religion of building security into software and other products from the beginning of the process. That effort has succeeded in many ways, and now experts say […]

Researchers Focus on Attacking Satellite Systems

TENERIFE–The security of wireless networks and devices is generally regarded as somewhere between mediocre and horrendous. And that’s after nearly 20 years of attention from researchers. Now, some of those researchers are focusing on satellite systems and networks and are finding the security of those targets depressingly bad. Gabriel Gonzalez, a researcher at IO Active, […]

Welcome to the Golden Age of IoT Hacking

TENERIFE–Nostalgia for the 1990s may be all the rage at the moment (see: The X-Files, The People vs. O.J. Simpson) but when it comes to security, no one is looking to go back 20 years. Sadly, that’s about where the security of many IoT devices belongs, experts say, and there doesn’t look to be much […]

On the Wire Podcast: Adam Shostack

Adam Shostack has done just about everything in the security community over the course of his career. He spent years at the late, lamented privacy start-up Zero Knowledge Systems, then moved to Microsoft, where he worked on a variety of projects. But he’s probably best known for his work on threat modeling at Microsoft and […]

Harvard Study Questions ‘Going Dark’ Crypto Problem

The FBI and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies have warned for years that the increased use of encryption by consumers is making surveillance and lawful interception much more difficult, impeding investigations. But a new study by a group of experts at Harvard’s Berkman Center says those claims are largely overblown and that the IoT […]