Group items tagged

"The hackers who stole 4.5 million patient records from an American hospital network might have exploited the infamous Heartbleed bug to carry out the hack - the first time the bug has been reported to be at the center of a high-profile breach."

"iTunes phishing scams Compromised phones or computers Celebrity passwords/emails as part of a larger password dump (such as the Adobe hack) Mobile-phone or computer-repair individuals abusing access Password reset questions guess Brute force"

"If reelected, British Prime Minister David Cameron would consider banning messaging apps like Snapchat and WhatsApp, if they don't make their data available to intelligence agencies, he said Monday."

"1. 123456 (Unchanged from 2013) 2. password (Unchanged) 3. 12345 (Up 17) 4. 12345678 (Down 1) 5. qwerty (Down 1) 6. 234567890 (Unchanged) 7. 1234 (Up 9) 8. baseball (New) 9. dragon (New) 10. football (New) 11. 1234567 (Down 4) 12. monkey (Up 5) 13. letmein (Up 1) 14. abc123 (Down 9) 15. 111111 (Down 8) 16. mustang (New) 17. access (New) 18. shadow (Unchanged) 19. master (New) 20. michael (New) 21. superman (New) 22. 696969 (New) 23. 123123 (Down 12) 24. batman (New) 25. trustno1 (Down 1)"

"Prominent Bahraini activist Nabeel Rajab was sentenced to six months in jail on Tuesday after criticizing the country's security forces on Twitter. Rajab was arrested in October for tweeting that Bahrain's security organizations are "ideological incubators" for those who join terrorist groups."

"With news that the 15 million Twitter users in the UK can now be targeted at individual postcode levels, the micro-blogging platform is selling its advertising opportunities as ultra-geographically precise, and therefore ultra-cost effective. "The key benefit of geo-targeting is that it enables advertisers, or in this case political parties, the ability to reach users in specific regions, metropolitan areas and now postcodes," Twitter said in a blog post. "

"Halifax's system, which is currently at the proof-of-concept stage, uses a piece of wearable technology known as the Nymi band; it monitors and stores a user's heartbeat via an electrocardiogram (ECG). Users must wear the Nymi on one wrist, and touch its top sensor with the opposite hand for it to work. The Nymi pairs with a smartphone via Bluetooth, using a companion app for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. Removal of the wristband invalidates biometric authentication."

"The BBC complained that a 2007 article about the ousting of Merrill Lynch's CEO had been pulled from certain Google searches in Europe. The Guardian revealed that six articles had been pulled from search results, including three from as far back as 2010 about a Scottish referee who was forced to resign after lying about a penalty and one from 2011 about French workers making Post-it art."

"Regin is a tool capable of infecting and compromising entire networks, not just individual computers, as security companies Symantec and Kaspersky Labs detailed in their technical reports published on Sunday and Monday. It's not only a computer virus or malware, but also a toolkit or platform that can be used for different purposes, depending on the needs of the attackers. It can collect passwords, retrieve deleted files, and even take over entire networks and infrastructures, according to researchers. "

""I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence," Gates wrote. "First, the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though, the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don't understand why some people are not concerned.

"MEMS and nanotechnology utilize seemingly impossibly small mechanisms in order to sense, control and respond to a particular environment - these technologies can sense mechanical information as well as biological data. Many MEMS sensors function by detecting small electrical currents that provide data on things such as position, geomagnetic field, acceleration and more, and then pass this information along to other mechanisms within a device or machine. "

"While 77% of shoppers in a recent study by Opinion Lab said in-store tracking is unacceptable, 61% also responded that they expect to be compensated with cost-saving discounts if they're tracked. How stores sell in-store tracking to shoppers and highlight its benefits is where one of the next major battles of retail will be fought, Kilcourse says. "

"Though she still doesn't have a personal Twitter account, Queen Elizabeth II, the monarch of the United Kingdom, has tweeted for the first time. The Queen tweeted from the official account of the British Monarchy after opening the Information Age exhibition at London's Science Museum on Friday. The tweet, below, is signed "Elizabeth R.""

"At 221 of the Fortune 500 companies, Fortune magazine's list of the the top 500 U.S. public corporations ranked by gross revenue, employees' credentials are posted publicly online for hackers to steal and reuse in cyberattacks, according to new research from the web intelligence firm Recorded Future. "

""We believe a very large portion of healthcare spend is preventable," said John Kelly, IBM's SVP of solutions research, in an interview with Mashable. "Costs can improve dramatically through these technologies." Kelly is so confident in Watson Health Cloud that he thinks it can not only halt the growth of healthcare costs, but also reverse them."

"Durumeric leads a team of researchers at the University of Michigan that has developed scanning software called ZMap. This tool can probe the whole public Internet in under an hour, revealing information about the roughly four billion devices online. The scan results can show which sites are vulnerable to particular security flaws. In the case of FREAK, a scan was used to measure the scale of the threat before the bug was publicly announced."

"A new type of threat, however, goes one step further: the physical destruction of your computer."

"Uber knows when your phone battery is running low because its app collects that information in order to switch into power-saving mode. But Chen swears Uber would never use that knowledge to gouge you out of more money. "We absolutely don't use that to kind of like push you a higher surge price, but it's an interesting kind of psychological fact of human behavior," Chen said. Uber's surge pricing uses a proprietary algorithm that accounts for how many users are hailing rides in an area at a given time. Customers are apparently less willing to believe that when the multiplier is a round number like 2.0 or 3.0, which seems more like it could have been arbitrarily made up by a human."

"This person or group, who go by the names BestBuy and Popopret, recently spammed an ad to folks on Jabber, an instant messaging service. They offered to perform a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on whomever their client(s) wanted, and they backed up their offer by claiming to wield the ability to perform some of the strongest DDoS attacks ever seen. Recent events in the history of the internet show us that these kind of attacks - if these hackers indeed have the power they claim - can wreak internet havoc by blocking user access to a range of some of the web's most popular destinations."

"IDFC Bank has launched an app called Aadhaar Pay that aims to help millions of its citizens without a smartphone to pay for their purchases digitally with just their fingerprint.  Merchants will be able to download the app on their Android smartphones and attach a fingerprint scanner device. To make payments, buyers will only have to choose their bank name, input their unique Aadhaar number and scan their fingerprint, which acts as a password to make the payment directly from their bank account linked to their Aadhaar card."