Security

At EFF we put security and privacy first. This means working hard at keeping our members and site visitors safe, as well as the people who use the software we develop. We also dedicate staff time to advising security researchers, maintaining resources like our Coders' Rights Project, and helping groups like Facebook improve their bug reporting policies.

A hacker who broke into a large bank in the United Arab Emirates made good on his threat to release customer data after the bank refused to pay a bitcoin ransom worth about $3 million.

The hacker, who calls himself Hacker Buba, breached the network of a bank in Sharjah last month reportedly identified as Invest Bank, and began releasing customer account and transaction records via Twitter.

There are plenty of reasons you might want to use a virtual private network (VPN) but, for most of us, the primary purpose comes down to privacy.

China claims to have arrested the hackers responsible for the gargantuan theft of personal information through the Office of Personnel Management breach and is asserting that the hack was a criminal rather than a state-sponsored act.

Without a doubt, the app that has generated the most buzz within privacy circles of late is Signal, a secure messaging service.

The app is marketed toward anyone interested in privacy—whether one happens to be leaking sensitive documents or shooting the breeze with friends. It’s free to download, and it consistently ranks at the top of many cryptographers’ shortlist of communications tools in terms of security and convenience.

On Monday, a random posting to Pastebin offered 1,300 email addresses and passwords to anyone who happened to come across the file, and provided a sponsored link to what the post claims to be a file containing billions of PayPal accounts.

The post on Pastebin records the email address and password for 1,300 people, and claims to be a list of PayPal accounts. There is an Ad Fly link to what's said to be a downloadable master list of 23,873,667,087 hacked accounts. Aside from loading an Ad, the link itself is dead, as the download domain doesn't exist anymore.

File under interesting start-up moves: Cognitive Systems has debuted a platform for the real-time visualizations of wireless signals, for securing both the wireless and physical world.

Cognitive’s platform detects motion using wireless signals, and identifies wireless devices connected to a user’s network. Applications built on the platform notify users when a device—authorized or unauthorized—connects to their network or when an untrusted network is broadcasting in their vicinity.

Hackers have staged cyber-attacks on three Greek banks and demanded a ransom in bitcoins, a virtual monetary unit, to stop their disruption, banking sources said on Monday.

The sources said the hackers managed to block the Internet banking activity of three Greek lenders for a few hours last Thursday but did not penetrate the banks' security or obtain confidential client data or access to accounts.

VTech, the hacked maker of electronic toys and apps that leaked the data of 4.8 million customers, including hundreds of thousands of children, exposed gigabytes worth of pictures and chat histories on the same compromised servers, according to an article published on Motherboard, the website that first broke news of the breach.

Consumers lack knowledge and education about the chip-and-PIN cards they have been receiving from card issuers, new research shows.

According to a survey from CA Technologies, more than half of US adults have been issued a credit/debit card with a chip (59%).