Cybercrime

Malware is running rampant on the Internet, affecting smartphones, tablets and personal computers. Relatively new malware allows bad guys to encrypt devices until a ransom is paid. Usually the ransom is required in bitcoin, rather than U.S. currency, as it cannot be traced. What are the legal and ...

Sony reportedly has used Amazon Web Services to launch distributed denial of service attacks on sites carrying files stolen from its network. Those attacks apparently involved "hundreds of computers" in Tokyo and Singapore. Amazon reportedly issued a statement denying the claim, but the language it ...

Who breached Sony Pictures' network and why continues to be a puzzle a week after news of the hack first emerged. Some speculate it was an inside job. A few have pointed fingers at North Korea, which returned its own one-finger salute in response. Others discount that possibility. In the meantime, t...

The United States Department of State on Sunday announced its unclassified email system has been breached, making it the fourth U.S. government organization to have fallen prey to hackers in recent months. The State Department took down its website and unclassified email system and reportedly used G...

The most successful phishing attacks manage to dupe their victims a full 45 percent of the time, according to a study released last week by Google. On average, phishing's success rate is about 14 percent, but even the most obvious scams still manage to lure 3 percent of the people targeted to a fake...

Europol on Friday announced that agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the FBI and Eurojust have taken down more than 400 cybercrime services accessible via the Tor browser. They include the dark market Silk Road 2.0. Its operator, Blake Benthall, was arrested, along with six Britons...

Over the 4th of July weekend, 82 people were shot in Chicago, and at least 14 of them died from their wounds. For the year, there were 63 homicides in Oakland as of late October. Philadelphians logged 47 homicides in the first 64 days of this year, two more than were killed in New York City during t...

The Pew Research Center last week released a report suggesting that cyberattacks in the next 10 years might cause major destruction of human lives and tens of billions of dollars in property damage. However, the situation might not be as overwhelming as the raw numbers indicate, according to one of ...

Toll fraud -- the hijacking of a phone system to dial out to premium numbers in distant countries at several dollars a minute -- costs companies more than $4.7 billion a year, up nearly $1 billion from 2011. Major carriers have sophisticated fraud systems in place to catch hackers, and they can affo...

Yet another major retailer -- this time, office supply chain Staples -- reportedly has fallen victim to a data breach. More than half a dozen banks operating on the East Coast have seen fraudulent charges made at non-Staples businesses, such as supermarkets and other big-box retailers, by people usi...

Private videos and pictures shared between tens of thousands of Snapchat users -- possibly as many as 200,000 -- were posted online by hackers over the weekend in an episode dubbed the "Snappening." Much of the content is sexual, including many nude photos -- some possibly of minors. The hackers app...

Kaspersky Lab this week reported that criminals have been emptying ATMs and infecting them with malware dubbed "Tyupkin." About 50 machines have been infected in eastern Europe, and the attacks have spread to the United States, India and China, based on statistics culled from VirusTotal, Kaspersky s...

Banks and businesses toiled over the weekend to crush a bug in a widely used open source operating system. The flaw has been in Unix for some 25 years, but it was revealed just last week. If exploited, the vulnerability in BASH could be used to inject malicious code or take command of a system or de...

Walk into any electronics store and you will find antivirus software from companies like Norton, ESET, McAfee and Kaspersky. In the last few years, the risk has spread from our computers to our smartphones and our tablets. The next thing we will have to protect may be our cars -- and our lives could...

Attackers for months have been using eBay listings to redirect visitors to password-harvesting scam sites. They use cross-site scripting to hijack eBay shoppers and trick them into handing over personal data. Smartphones, televisions, hot tubs and clothing are among the items supposedly for sale in ...