Security

Passwords have turned into a necessary evil, particularly for people who use dozens or hundreds of apps, websites, and other services. Follow the usual rules and create a strong, complex password for each account, and there's no way for you to manage them all on your own. Break the rules and use the same weak passwords on all or most of your accounts, and you risk the threat of compromise from hackers.

But just how vulnerable are you if you do use weak or popular passwords? New research from password manager Nordpass shows just how quickly a hacker can crack a popular password.

The history of hacking has largely been a back-and-forth game, with attackers devising a technique to breach a system, defenders constructing a countermeasure that prevents the technique, and hackers devising a new way to bypass system security. On Monday, Intel is announcing its plans to bake a new parry directly into its CPUs that’s designed to thwart software exploits that execute malicious code on vulnerable computers.

OmniBallot is election software that is used by dozens of jurisdictions in the United States. In addition to delivering ballots and helping voters mark them, it includes an option for online voting. At least three states—West Virginia, Delaware, and New Jersey—have used the technology or are planning to do so in an upcoming election. Four local jurisdictions in Oregon and Washington state use the online voting feature as well.

A researcher has published exploit code for a Microsoft Windows vulnerability that, when left unpatched, has the potential to spread from computer to computer with no user interaction.

Hackers have stolen confidential documents from a US military contractor which provides critical support for the country's Minuteman III nuclear deterrent, Sky News has learnt.

After gaining access to Westech International's computer network, the criminals encrypted the company's machines and began to leak documents online to pressure the company to pay extortion.

Only around a third of users usually change their passwords following a data breach announcement, according to a recent study published by academics from the Carnegie Mellon University's Security and Privacy Institute (CyLab).

The study, presented earlier this month at the IEEE 2020 Workshop on Technology and Consumer Protection, was not based on survey data, but on actual browser traffic.

Late last year, David Haynes, a security engineer at the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare, found himself gazing at a strange image. “It was pure gibberish,” he says. “A whole bunch of gray and black pixels, made by a machine.” He declined to share the image, saying it would be a security risk.

Nippon Telegraph & Telephone (NTT), the 64th biggest company in the world, according to the Fortune 500 list, has disclosed today a security breach.

NTT says hackers gained access to its internal network and stole information on 621 customers from its communications subsidiary, NTT Communications, the largest telecommunications company in Japan, and one of the biggest worldwide.

A warning that hackers are exploiting vulnerable email servers doesn't qualify as an unusual event in general. But when that warning comes from the National Security Agency, and the hackers are some of the most dangerous state-sponsored agents in the world, run-of-the-mill email server hacking becomes significantly more alarming.

Hackers have released a new jailbreak that any user can employ to gain root access on any iPhone, regardless of the hardware as long as it runs iOS 11 or later.