Security

Privacy expert and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ashkan Soltani will be the FTC's new chief technologist, FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez announced Tuesday. "Ashkan is well qualified and was an excellent choice for the agency," said Ginger McCall, an associate director with the Electronic Privacy I...

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...

Whisper, an app that purports to send messages anonymously, reportedly has been tracking the location of its users, including those who have turned off their geolocation feature. Even more incendiary than the location-tracking accusation is the allegation that Whisper has identified smartphones use...

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...

The NSA's wide-ranging surveillance of people's communications worldwide is hitting America's high-tech industry hard, said panelists on Wednesday at a roundtable held by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden in Palo Alto, California. Wyden set the tone from the start: "This is going to cost A...

Various U.S. government agencies have been conducting research on how best to meet the challenge of privacy in the digital age, with investigations of a wide range of technology issues including encryption, data tagging, sensors, healthcare records and clinical informatics. As useful as this researc...

The use of personal devices creates a privacy challenge. Employers want access to the devices, and employees want to protect their personal data contained on them. The term "devices" itself is deceiving. Many consider employee-owned devices to be smartphones and tablets, as the term "BYOD," or Bring...

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 ...

Home Depot on Thursday said it had excised the malware demon from its computerized payment system after its recent discovery of a security breach in which thieves stole records of 56 million credit cards. Home Depot stopped short of admitting that an ongoing security upgrade may have contributed to ...

DoD is committed to pursuing cloud-based services and steadily has been improving its capabilities to utilize the technology. The latest evidence of its embracing the cloud is approval of a protocol that will facilitate the use of the technology at higher security levels. The department's Defense In...

Despite the efforts of some big name tech players, consumers have been reluctant to turn their smartphones into wallets. That could be about to change with Apple Pay. Apple Pay is the new mobile payment system Apple introduced with its iPhone 6 and 6 Plus earlier this week. "Apple being Apple is goi...