It’s true. After days of speculation over whether the NSA knew about the Heartbleed vulnerability that affected as many as two thirds of the websites on the internet, two anonymous sources tell Bloomberg that the NSA didn’t just know about it, they used it to gather intelligence.
Over the next three years, the U.S. Army will be filling its brand new cyber warfare institute at West Point with the best and brightest hackers it can find. Not just hackers, however: the institute will bring together psychologists, lawyers, mathematicians—anyone who can help the country win the inevitable cyber war and save America.
Heartbleed is a scary thing. Aside from the violent-sounding name, the vulnerability in OpenSSL security protocols spans the entire internet and affects most of the sites we know, love, and use
Federal regulators just alerted banks across the country of a very dangerous new skill ATM hackers have picked up. They can trick ATMs into spitting out unlimited amounts of cash, regardless of the customer’s balance. Not only that, but also schedule the illicit withdrawals for holidays and weekends, when the ATMs are extra flush.
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Kasperkspy Labs recently launched a beautifully terrifying interactive map that shows online threats arounds the world in real time. In practice, it’s a global visualization of cyber attacks that, Kaspersky hopes, will motivate you to buy their security software. But it’s still a hell of a spectacle.
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It’s getting remarkably easy to hack ATMs these days, and security researchers say that Microsoft’s aging Windows XP is making the problem worse. This week, security analysts at Symantec blogged about a new technique popping up in Mexico that uses text messages to give hackers access. It’s as wild as it sounds.
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Minority Report references are old hat in the tech world. In fact, it’s often a great way to describe technology that, as the cliche goes, "sounds like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel," yet is destined to remain a fiction. But this futuristic facial-recognition security system is the exception. It exists, and it’s scary good.
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Imagine you’re walking around, enjoying the early spring sunshine, and looking for a Wi-Fi network. You hear a whirring sound above you, look up, and there’s a drone, just chilling. Did that drone just take your picture? Nah. It just stole all the precious passwords from your smartphone.
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Good news, security lovers! Google just announced that Gmail will be all encrypted all the time. More specifically, every single email you send or receive will use an encrypted HTTPS connection, regardless of which device you’re using and which network. Even public Wi-Fi is okay.
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It does’t normally do this, but the NSA just released a statement in response to the recent report about the agency’s habit
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