Industry News

Google's October hardware event took place this morning in New York City. During its presentation, the company showed off three new pieces of hardware: the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro smartphones, and the Pixel Watch 2. The new phones are flush with new features, from secure face authentication and seven years of software support to a built-in thermometer, while the second-generation Pixel Watch has more modest improvements over its predecessor. There are also some software upgrades coming to the Pixel Buds Pro, Google's wireless earbuds.

The introduction of Apple CarPlay in 2016 was a game-changer. Until then, connecting your phone to your car meant bothering with Bluetooth, and if you wanted to use a smartphone navigation app, you probably needed some kind of phone holder clipped to an air vent or suction-cupped to the dashboard. Being able to cast your phone's screen to the car's infotainment system turned out to be extremely popular, and by 2020, it was a feature that almost half of all new car buyers wanted.

About a year ago, the US security firm Palo Alto Networks began to hear from a flurry of companies that had been hacked in ways that weren't the norm for cybercriminals. Native English-speaking hackers would call up a target company’s IT helpdesk posing as an employee, and seek login details by pretending to have lost theirs.

They had all the employee information needed to sound convincing. And once they got access, they’d quickly find their way into the company's most sensitive repositories to steal that data for extortion.

Incomplete information included in recent disclosures by Apple and Google reporting critical zero-day vulnerabilities under active exploitation in their products has created a “huge blindspot” that’s causing a large number of offerings from other developers to go unpatched, researchers said Thursday.

Apple has patched a potent chain of iOS zero-days that were used to infect the iPhone of an Egyptian presidential candidate with sophisticated spyware developed by a commercial exploit seller, Google and researchers from Citizen Lab said Friday.

Telecommunications providers across the Middle East are being targeted with a new malware family that researchers are calling “HTTPSnoop.”

Cybersecurity experts at Cisco Talos published research on Tuesday about two pieces of malware that are masquerading as legitimate security software components, including Palo Alto Networks’ Cortex XDR application and Microsoft’s Exchange Web Services (EWS) platform – making detection difficult for defenders.

Researchers have discovered a never-before-seen backdoor for Linux that’s being used by a threat actor linked to the Chinese government.

Some 500 years ago, construction workers in the midst of building Ćmielów Castle in Poland carved a simple game board into a slab of the sandstone floor as a diversion for their leisure time. At least that's one possible scenario for the existence of a game board recently discovered by archaeologists in the castle ruins; it's also possible the board could have been carved by children or by servants after the castle was completed, or it may have been meant as a symbolic message.

The Food and Drug Administration greenlit two updated COVID-19 vaccine booster shots Monday—a day before advisors for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are scheduled to meet and vote on recommendations for use of the updated vaccines.

It's Apple season once again. We can always count on Apple to announce the newest iPhone model in September. This year’s event is almost upon us, and the company is expected to unveil its lineup of iPhone 15 models, as well as at least a couple of new Apple Watches during a livestreamed showcase this week. We should also see some announcements on software and services, and maybe even some other hardware accessories and tidbits.