Security

Following a court-ordered block of The Pirate Bay and a number of other file-sharing websites in Norway, the Norwegian Pirate Party (Piratpartiet Norge) has now set up free, uncensored DNS servers that anyone can use to bypass the block. While the DNS servers are based in Norway, anyone can use them: if your ISP is blocking access to certain sites via DNS blackholing/blocking, using the Piratpartiet's DNS servers should enable access.

An unpatched vulnerability affecting PayPal’s mobile applications can be exploited to access restricted accounts and even bypass the two-factor authentication (2FA) mechanism, a researcher claims.

PayPal can ask users to confirm their identity for fraud protection and due to regulatory obligations. When users are asked to verify their identity, they are blocked from accessing their account and instructed to call or email PayPal to complete the process.

The U.S. government has not yet notified any of the 21.5 million federal employees and contractors whose security clearance data was hacked more than three months ago, officials acknowledged on Tuesday.

The agency whose data was hacked, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), said the Defense Department will begin "later this month" to notify employees and contractors across the government that their personal information was accessed by hackers.

Passwords are a bane of life on the Internet, but one Turing Award winner has an algorithmic approach that he thinks can make them not only easier to manage but also more secure.

The average user has some 20 passwords today, and in general the easier they are to remember, the less secure they are. When passwords are used across multiple websites, they become even weaker.

Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon 820 SoC is shaping up to be quite an impressive mobile chip. Earlier this month, the chip maker revealed that its Adreno 530 GPU will offer up to 40 percent faster performance while consuming 40 percent less power compared to the Adreno 430. What’s more, Qualcomm claimed its new image signal processing (ISP) unit would lead to mobile cameras capable of capturing DSLR-quality pictures.

These promises alone are enough to excite most mobile enthusiasts but that’s only just the tip of the iceberg.

The largest Apple iCloud raid in history has seen nearly a quarter of a million accounts compromised by malware targeting app pirates.

The hack spree, affecting at least 225,000 valid Apple cloud accounts, is hitting jailbroken iThings – devices that have had Cupertino's strict device security controls bypassed and disabled.

The latest release of the immensely popular Linux distribution designed for penetration testing, Kali Linux 2.0 launched at DefCon 23 in Las Vegas last week.

Kali is the successor to BackTrack, and is a Debian-based Linux distribution that includes hundreds of penetration-testing tools pre-installed and ready to go. Just boot it from a USB drive or live DVD and you’ll have a penetration-testing—or “hacking”—environment with all the tools you might want just waiting for you to fire them up.

The surprise guest at LinuxCon in Seattle this morning was none other than Linus Torvalds, the driving force behind the Linux kernel and a central figure in the open-source movement. Torvalds wasn’t on stage for long, speaking for less than 15 minutes in a Q&A with Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin, but he touched on several key topics, including the Internet of Things, security issues, and his ongoing role in overseeing the Linux kernel.

The massive leak attributed to the hackers who rooted to the Ashley Madison dating website for cheaters has been confirmed to be genuine. As if that wasn't bad enough, the 10 gigabytes of data—compressed, no less—is far more wide-ranging than almost anyone could have imagined.

Mobile phone users are at risk from a signalling flaw that allows hackers to intercept all voice calls and track locations.

Australian TV programme 60 minutes is claiming the scoop, showing in a special report how hackers were able to record the mobile phone conversations of a prominent politician and track his movements from a base thousands of miles away in Germany.