Articles about Security

It seems not a day goes by when there isn't some sort of news about a security breach or malware. And lately, those have become more high profile -- Target not too long ago had customer information leaked and Snapchat just surrendered data, with the latter not even bothering to apologize to its customers.

Now a report from security researchers at Fox IT claims that Yahoo has been spreading malware through the ads served on the site. "Clients visiting yahoo.com received advertisements served by ads.yahoo.com. Some of the advertisements are malicious", the company notes.

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Snapchat has received quite a bit of publicity after allegedly turning down buyout offers of billions of dollars from Facebook and Google. Now, the service is in the spotlight once again following a leak which exposed 4.6 million phone numbers and usernames.

Snapchat has responded to the leak in a blog post, which explains that the culprit is actually an abuse of the Find Friends feature. According to the service, "it was possible for an attacker to use the functionality of Find Friends to upload a large number of random phone numbers and match them with Snapchat usernames. On New Years Eve [sic], an attacker released a database of partially redacted phone numbers and usernames. No other information, including Snaps, was leaked or accessed in these attacks".

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The Syrian Electronic Army is no stranger to the headlines, and the group's latest exploits have gained it further attention. This time the target is Microsoft, specifically Skype. The SEA target the Skype Twitter stream, as well as Facebook page and blog in what may be the first high-profile hack attack of the New Year.

The group defaced the blog with a message to Microsoft that read "Hacked by Syrian Electronic Army.. Stop Spying!". A message posted on the Skype Facebook page read "Don't use Microsoft emails (hotmail,outlook), They are monitoring your accounts and selling the data to the governments."

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It's inevitable that at this time of year tech companies and analysts like to try to grab headlines with their predictions for the coming 12 months. Security specialist Kaspersky Lab is no exception, and guaranteed to make waves is its forecast of the collapse of the internet as we know it.

This, it says, will be driven by pressure to break the web up into national segments. So far this has only applied to counties like China with its Great Firewall, but other nations including Russia have planned legislation to prohibit the use of foreign services. In November, Germany announced that all communications between the German authorities would be fully locked within the country. Brazil too has announced its plans to build an alternative internet channel so as not to use the one that goes through Florida.

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I frequently make resolutions throughout the year, ranging from being more patient to losing some weight. However, I give technology little to no attention in this respect, which may seem a bit unusual coming from someone who writes about it for a living. But, lately, I have been thinking about making some changes, and what I could do more in regards to tech.

I do have realistic expectations, as I am in no way trying to convince myself that I will actually work on every item from this list, starting January 1. It's a fool's errand as far as I'm concerned. Instead, these are the things I would like to build towards this following year, with the end goal of steadily improving myself throughout 2014.

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Well, that's another year out of the way! It's customary at this time of year to make resolutions... for some people at least. It's something I've always shied away from, but this year is going to be different.

I don’t smoke anymore, I don’t need to lose weight, and I'm unlikely to take over the world in the next twelve months. But when it comes to tech, there is room for improvement, so here are my New Year's resolution that I will, truly, try to stick to.

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The NSA's indiscriminate collection of telephone data has been ruled as legal by a federal judge in New York. Judge William Pauley ruled that the National Security Agency's activities do not violate the constitution. Just last week, another federal judge suggested that the collection of phone records was likely to violate the US constitution and a White House review panel has already recommended that President Obama stops the NSA in its tracks.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had brought a case to court challenging the NSA program, but Judge Pauley's ruling put an end to this. It looks like there could be something of a battle ahead, and the latest ruling opens up the possibility that the matter will be settled by the US Supreme Court. Referring to the fourth amendment, Judge Pauley said that whether it "protects bulk telephony metadata is ultimately a question of reasonableness."

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At this time of year in the UK it is traditional for the Queen to record a message to the nation. Broadcast on TV at 3pm just as everyone is recovering from Christmas lunch, she looks back over the year in a speech which usually has a reflective tone. In recent years there have been numerous alternatives to the Queen's speech, with broadcaster Channel 4 giving a platform to the funny, the controversial, the meaningful and the strange. Whilst not necessarily anti-monarchy, it is a broadcast that is certainly non-monarchist, and frequently of a more left-wing bent. This year, Edward Snowden used it as a mouthpiece.

The 30-year-old former NSA worker who blew the cover off the secret surveillance that is being carried out on web users all over the world. He is currently living in Russia where he sought asylum having fled from the US earlier in the year after threats of espionage charges. The two minute long address makes reference to the book 1984, with Snowden saying that George Orwell had forewarned us of such dangers but said that the spying techniques described in the classic work were nothing compared to what actually exists now.

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Edward Snowden says (according to Reuters) that RSA Security accepted $10 million from the National Security Agency in exchange for installing (or allowing to have installed) a secret backdoor so the NSA could decrypt messages as it pleased. Hell no says RSA (a division of storage vendor EMC), stating in very strong terms that this was not at all the case. But then in a second day look at the RSA/EMC statement bloggers began to see the company as dissembling, their firm defense as really more of a non-denial denial. So what’s the truth here and what’s the lesson?

For the truth I reached deep into the bowels of elliptic cryptography to an old friend who was one of the technology’s inventors.

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Dr Alan Turing, the mathematician who helped to crack the Enigma code during the second world war, has been granted a royal pardon 59 years after he took his own life. His crime? Homosexuality. In spite of his role in code cracking -- which is widely regarded as having helped to shorten the war -- he was convicted for engaging in homosexual activity, and underwent experimental chemical castration as "cure" and punishment in 1952. Two years later he killed himself aged just 41.

It was the illegality of homosexuality that meant Turing's relationship with a man led to a criminal record, and this in turn meant that he was no longer permitted to continue his work at GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters). The UK's justice secretary, Chris Grayling requested the pardon which was then granted under the Royal Prerogative of Mercy. Grayling said:

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There was a time when "activist investor" Carl Icahn actually owned and ran businesses, one of which was TransWorld Airlines (TWA), eventually sold to American Airlines. In an attempt to cut costs, TWA under Icahn outsourced reservation service to a call center built in a prison with prisoners on the phone. When you called to book travel you were giving your credit card number to a felon and telling him when you’d be away from home. Smart move, Carl, and very akin to what may have caused the post-Thanksgiving theft of 40 million credit card numbers from Target, the U.S. discount retailer.

Target used to do its IT all in the USA, then to save costs they moved IT to a subsidiary in India. Care to guess where the Target data breach came from? I’m guessing India. I’m also guessing that there will never be any arrests in the case.

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Just last month Google and Microsoft came together in an unlikely pairing. This was not a software venture, but a bid to help tackle the problem of child porn online. UK Prime Minister David Cameron has said on numerous occasions that ISPs needed to do more to not only block access to torrent sites -- despite the fact they can be used for perfectly legal downloads -- but also to make it more difficult for children to access pornography. Four major ISPs either already have porn filters in place, or have plans to roll them out.

TalkTalk's filters have been in place for a few years now, Sky's were recently launched and Virgin is piloting a scheme due for full scale roll out at some point in 2014. In the past few days, BT switched on its filters, falling in line with government requests for access to legal porn to be made opt-in -- i.e. blocked by default. So is this having the desired effect? Well, it's very early days, but there are a few observations to be made already.

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This is the final roundup before Christmas and the penultimate one of 2014. Things are very much starting to wind down for the year, and the world of tech is starting to go into something of a hibernation mode. But that's not to say that there hasn't been a fair select of big stories over the past seven days. If you're dreading the prospect of traveling across the country to meet up with family, Microsoft may have a solution -- just turn to Skype instead!

Valve's highly anticipated Steam OS was made available to the public as a beta, so gamers can create their own rigs. Gamers with a lots of spare cash floating around might prefer to opt for a solid gold Xbox One -- but the price tag is an eye-watering £6000 (around $9,800)! For those to whom quality matters, Amazon's announcement that all new shows in 4K Ultra HD will come as great news. For entertainment at slightly lower resolution, Redbox Instant made an appearance on the Kindle Fire HDX -- a tablet that I was quite enamored with. Roku 3 users can also celebrate the arrival of YouTube for their video entertainment.

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It's probably not something you need worry about in relation to your personal files just yet, but according to a newly published paper (the snappily titled "RSA Key Extraction via Low-Bandwidth Acoustic Cryptanalysis") it appears that it is possible to extract 4096-bit RSA decryption keys by listening to the sounds made by a computer.

This might sound like the talk of someone paranoid, but it is actually more feasible than you might first think. And the paper has been penned by no less than Adi Shamir, the co-inventor of the RSA algorithm.

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Having uncovered the Android dialler malware last week, mobile security specialist Lookout is warning of a new threat involving a tangled web of spam, foreign banks and bulk messaging.

The threat surrounds a bulk SMS network called Bazuc which offers Android users a payout if they allow the network to access their unused SMS message allowance. The app has been downloaded up to 50,000 times from the Play Store but the author claims up to 100 downloads an hour so it’s evidently on third-party stores too.

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